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13 Market Research Tools: Best in Class for 2023

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Most market research tools are designed to make it quicker and easier to find relevant data . Whatever the market, product, or purpose, the right research tools can do just that.

But, let’s be honest, some do it far better than others.

Whether you’re an enterprise firm with complex needs and a budget to suit or a smaller business needing free market research tools, read on to discover which online tools for market research are hot right now.

Note: The top market research tools list has been collated using review platforms like G2 , along with direct feedback I collected from over 500 business leaders in June, 2o22.

#1 Best overall market research tool: Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence

Most-loved feature: The Benchmarking tool

We might be a little biased, but this really is the fastest way to see how you measure up against competitors in any sector or location. Analyze market leaders and rising stars to unpack and track their digital success instantly.

Quick Explainer

Similarweb Research Intelligence is a single source of truth for the online world. Giving any business the ability to quickly analyze the online aspects of any industry or market in an instant. It displays critical insights in a way that makes it easy to view trends, competitive performance, audience insights, growth opportunities, and more. It’s the only market research analysis tool that brings together data from desktop, mobile web, and apps to provide a complete view of the digital landscape.

Key abilities

• Competitive benchmarking
• Market research
• Company research tool
• Audience analysis
• Consumer journey tracker
• Mobile app intelligence

Freemium Version: Yes, there is a lite version of the product that provides limited data for a single user, and a single location.

Free Trial: Yes, there’s a 7-day trial available. Try it out here .

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay monthly or annually for a subscription. Different levels are available, and each package is tailored. Review pricing and plans for Similarweb here.

Like what you’ve seen so far?

See our market-leading digital research tool in action in this quick 2-minute clip.

#2 Best free market research tool: Think with Google

Most-loved feature: Find my Audience

A way to discover new audiences on YouTube based on things like habits, interests, and intended plans to purchase.

Think with Google is a suite of digital research tools that curate resources from a huge pool of data across the web. It presents them as insights that aren’t typically available elsewhere. It’s a unique way to view trends, insights, and stats. Data isn’t offered in real-time but serves more as a library of figures and facts that take the form of articles, videos, interviews, case studies, and more. In addition to being a place people can go for forward-looking perspectives and data, there are several tools designed to help marketers.

Key functions

• High-level insights into most local or national markets
• Behind the scenes look at cross-platform digital campaigns
• Consumer insights
• Deck-ready stats (not in real-time)
• A range of tools to inform marketing objectives and actions

Freemium Version: The entire suite of market intelligence tools is free.

Free Trial: As a free market research tool, no trial is needed.

Ongoing Subscription: You can subscribe to a newsletter, but not the product.

#3 Best digital research tool for content and FAQ development: Answer the Public

Most-loved feature: Search listening alerts

A pro feature that sends you weekly emails that indicate how search behaviors shift over time. It takes the specific phrase or keywords you’re tracking in the platform and updates you weekly.

Quick Explainer 

Discover the questions people are asking online about key terms, products, or services. It’s designed to help content teams and website owners develop new content ideas, and relevant FAQs that are based on the types of queries people ask online.

• Track important keywords and phrases
• Get weekly emails about changes in search behavior
• Enter any keyword to uncover relevant questions or search terms
• Folders to help organize your research

Freemium Version: Yes. You get a limited number (3) of searches per day.

Free Trial: No.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes. You can pay monthly or annually for this service. Pay-monthly fees are a flat rate of $99. Discounts are offered for yearly subscriptions.

#4 Best tool for market research surveys: SurveyMonkey

Most-loved feature: Question bank

A library of hundreds of questions, pre-written by survey methodologists.

As far as market research surveys go, it’s the leading online research tool for surveys worldwide. With plans to suit the individual through to the enterprise, it’s a feature-rich, easy-to-use platform that encompasses creation, collection, and analysis under one roof. Surveys are optimized for any device and integrate with platforms like Zoom, Salesforce, Marketo, and more.

Key functions 

• Create and send unlimited surveys, quizzes, and polls
• Pop-up online surveys
• Mobile app access to create, send and analyze surveys on-the-go
• Team collaboration function (unlocked with a team plan)
• Survey builder
• Customization and branded surveys (available with advantage or premier plans only)

Freemium Version: Yes

Free Trial: Occasionally, free trials are offered for premium plans.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay annually or monthly. There are three different plans to choose from, ranging from $25 to $129 per month.

Helpful: Check out our blog and see 18 different ways to use market research surveys .

#5 Best online research tool for marketplaces: Similarweb Shopper Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Cross-shopping analysis

Cross-shopping analysis shows you how loyal a segment of customers is to a brand, along with what other brands they browsed or bought from. Uncover competitors and discover new partnership opportunities; these are game-changing insights if you sell on any marketplace.

Similarweb Shopper Intelligence is a type of online market research tool that helps you uncover and analyze browsing and buying behavior across marketplaces. Using its data, businesses can track category, product, and brand performance with ease. It helps ecommerce organizations to detect potential threats, unearth new product or category opportunities, discover new potential partnerships, and optimize search strategy and performance.

• Monitor consumer demand for any product, brand, or category
• Retail search strategy optimization
• Consumer behavior insights
• Track cross-shopping, loyalty, and purchase frequency
• Analyze brand awareness

Note: This solution uses a unique data methodology via multiple networks and partnerships. At the time of writing, there is no other consumer behavior insights tool for market research that offers this quality of data for marketplaces.

Freemium Version: No.

Free Trial: Yes. There is usually a 7-day trial available here .

Ongoing Subscription: The price is determined by things like the number of categories and/or domains you want to access. Each quote is customized to a client’s specific needs.

Want to know a little more?

Watch this quick clip to see the best ecommerce digital market research tool in action.

#6 Best market research tool for brand tracking: Latana

Most-loved feature: MoE (margin of error) Readings

To deliver transparency on data confidence levels, Latana’s dashboard includes a feature that allows clients to toggle-on, or toggle-off, margin of error (MoE) readings on all data points. These are highlighted using a traffic-light system of confidence (red=low confidence, orange=medium confidence, and green=high confidence). This small feature makes a big impact — it helps clients to correctly interpret the data and to visibly see quality shortcomings.

Latana is a B2C brand tracking tool that provides granular insights about online audiences. It helps organizations understand how key segments of consumers feel about brands and portrays relevant standings vs. industry rivals.

• Focus on niche consumer segments that matter to your business
• Uncover rival’s audience data and identify opportunities to grow
• Understand brand perception, and track how it changes over time
• Discover the most well-known brands in your industry
• Track rival’s brand awareness across gender, age income, location, and education
• Find out the main purchase drivers for your industry
• Infrastructure gives reach to over 6 billion smartphone users globally for representative brand opinions

I caught up with Latana’s CMO, Angeley Mullens. Here’s what she has to say about their offering.

Ongoing Subscription: Pricing for Latana isn’t available online. All packages are tailored to individual brands and their specific needs.

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#7  Best research tool for social media listening: Hootsuite

Most-loved feature: Multi-channel insights

It’s a legacy feature, but one which makes it the best online research tool for social listening and monitoring. Having the ability to easily schedule posts, ad campaigns, and handle responses for every social media channel from within a single platform is what makes this a market-leading digital research tool.

Hootsuite continues to claim the number 1 spot on G2’s list of digital research tools for social media monitoring . It’s a tool to help you manage all aspects of business social media, across multiple channels, in a single platform. As well as being able to manage your socials, it also keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends and activities of your rival’s social media channels.

• Publish and schedule social media posts
• Measure cross-platform results
• Message management
• Social media trend analysis
• Social media ad-campaign management

Freemium Version: Yes. You can get a free version that supports 2 social accounts and 1 user.

Free Trial: Yes. A 30-day free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: There are four plans; professional, team, business, and enterprise; ranging from $49-$739.

#8 Best digital research tool for prospecting: Similarweb Sales Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Insights generator tool

The insights generator shows you unique facts for your prospects and accounts; with complete visibility into their digital strategy and performance. It’s ideal for refining sales and marketing efforts while staying focused on growth.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence helps organizations find viable prospects by showing you who to reach out to, when to do it, and how to capture their attention. The lead generator tool helps you find the right prospects, and key insights help create engaging outreach emails. For sales departments, ecommerce and mar-tech sectors, this type of digital research tool can take prospecting and engagement to a completely new level; along with revenue and growth.

Key functions: 

• Lead generation and enrichment
• Digital insights for 100M+ ecommerce websites, publishers, and advertisers
• Fraud detection
• Sales engagement
• SFDC integration

Free Trial: Yes, if you would like a free trial, please request that here.

Ongoing Subscription: Prices for this digital market research tool varies depending on the package and options chosen. Grab a live demo of the product and get a tailored quote here .

Insightful : If you’re looking at market research tools for the ecommerce industry, bookmark our Ecommerce Trends and Predictions for 2023 to read later.

#9 Best market research analysis tool for data visualization: Tableau

Most-loved feature : Connects to almost any data source

As a clear market leader, and a no-brainer for larger organizations with business intelligence analytics and teams. Tableau leads the way in online research tools for data visualization . It connects to a huge range of data sources and pulls information into a highly-appealing dashboard that is designed to make it easier and faster to explore and manage data . It takes data from platforms like Similarweb, then combines it with other data sources before presenting crisp, clear, insights that have the power to shape strategies and drive key transformations.

• Lightning-fast analytics
• Smart dashboards for richer insights
• Live connection to almost any data source, with automatic updates
• Drag-and-drop style UI: easy to use

Freemium Version: No. However, students and teachers get a year’s free access to the platform.

Free Trial: Yes. You can subscribe to a free 30-day trial.

Ongoing Subscription: Most plans are offered annually, with prices ranging from $15 per month upwards. The price depends on whether you use their hosted or on-premise versions, the number of users, and the inclusion of specific plugins.

#10 Best market research tool for UX testing: Loop11

Most-loved feature: Online usability testing

This feature analyzes the usability of a website with users performing live tasks on a site. It helps you understand user behavior, and shows how and why a website is used.

Loop11 is a market research tool that provides usability testing to help organizations build better websites and products. It comes with a pack of useful features that provide both moderated and unmoderated testing, helping businesses to find the right audience to test prototypes and products. It’s designed to help you see how appealing a product is to a particular audience, determine their preferences, then build these insights into a design.

• Ability to test across multiple devices, including tablet, mobile, or desktop
• User-friendly test builder that requires no coding
• Easy-to-add surveys that collect psychographic and demographic data
• Provides useful metrics like time on task, task completion rates, and NPS
• Mapping of customer journeys during a test period

Free Trial: Yes, a 14-day trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: All plans come with the option to pay monthly or annually. Prices range from $199-$599 per month.

#11 Best research tool for measuring customer experience: Temper

Most-loved feature: Rating stream

See real-time feedback as customers respond to questions via website or email channels. The stream provides a detailed view of ratings, comments, locations, referrers, email addresses, and more.

Temper allows any company to find out how customers feel about their product at all times. It directly provides first-party data to a business, preventing the need to design and distribute complex surveys. It can be placed as a widget on the site or in emails, and questions are asked to gain real-time feedback from visitors and customers alike.

• Easily deploy questions across website and email channels
• Quickly spot poor experiences to identify problematic areas of a business or product
• The rating graph gives you a real-time view of results for any question asked
• Public rating wall shows how you’re performing, instilling confidence and trust
• Ratings come with open text fields to give additional context to responses
• Referrer data gives you the ability to segment feedback and relative performance
• Tracking variables let you send data with ratings, such as order numbers, user IDs, etc.
• User targeting lets you determine who sees questions and how often they see them

Freemium Version: There is no freemium version. However, their hobby plan gives you a slimmed-down version of the product and costs $12 per month.

Ongoing Subscription: Four plans are available, ranging from hobbyist to enterprise. The lowest pricing tier starts at $12 monthly, and their top-tier solution costs $199 monthly. All plans are pay-monthly, with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

#12 Best online market research tool for focus groups: Remesh

Most-loved feature: Common topics

In just a few clicks, you can view the themes and topics that are most common with your focus group across an entire session. It groups similar responses, specific phrases, and interesting responses in seconds.

Remesh facilitates live, qualitative conversations with focus groups of up to 1000 people at a time. Replicating the focus group format online delivers powerful segmentation and dynamic capabilities that speed up your time to insight and let you hold a real-time conversation at scale.

• Launch a live conversation with up to 1000 people at a time
• Organize and analyze responses in an instant
• Segment your audience based on demographic and response data
• Share visuals and text-based content with the group to get instant feedback
• The algorithm analyzes open-ended responses in real-time

Freemium Version: No

Free Trial: Yes. However, you must first book a demo with a member of their team.

Ongoing Subscription: Remesh provides custom pricing plans that can only be obtained once you’ve taken a demonstration of their platform with a member of their team.

#13 Top collaboration and documentation tool for market research: BIT.AI

Most-loved feature: Content library + smart search

While it sounds quite basic; in essence, this tool for market research professionals makes it quicker and easier to keep track, share, and store key data. Forget trawling through emails, slack, and g-docs to find files; the smart search feature helps you locate files in an instant.

A dynamic platform that helps researchers collaborate, track, share, and manage research data in a single place. This is one of the best online market research tools for those who need a place to bring together resources like websites, PDFs, articles, images, infographics, blogs, reports, videos, etc. it’s low-cost and connects to some of the most widely used tools. Being able to share multidimensional data with others, or simply keeping track of secondary market research in a single place makes it a firm favorite.

• Over 100 integrations with applications like Tableau, Miro, G-docs, Onedrive, and more
• Real-time editing and live collaboration
• Content Library
• Smart search
• Supports a huge range of content and file types

Freemium Version: Yes. Available for teams of up to 5 collaborators.

Free Trial: Yes, a free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: A range of packages are available, costing between $8-$20 monthly.

Best market research tools for startups

There is another often-forgotten set of tools used for market research that are ideal for startups. If you’ve got zero budget and a little time on your hands, you can do most types of desk research for free. Sources include:

• Company reports, case studies, and whitepapers
• Research and trade associations
• Media coverage
• Internal sales or usage reports
• Academic or scientific journals
• Government and non-government agencies
• Public library records
• Competitor websites
• Educational institutions

Helpful: Check out this article about how to do market research for a startup .

Wrapping up….

With cost and time key considerations for anyone looking at tools for market research, it’s vital to choose wisely. While free market research tools are all good and well, they won’t always serve you when you’re on a deadline or require key insights on a specific competitor, market, or product.

Similarweb helps companies win in the digital world. Whatever the market, goal, or business size, its solutions are designed to help organizations understand their market and compete and beat rivals.

Take it for a test run today. Trial any Similarweb solution free for the first 7-days using this link .

Need to know more about the ROI of Similarweb? 

What are the best market research tools for secondary research?

The internet is probably the best tool for market research there is. It’s a goldmine of secondary market research data. But beware of data validity and check your information is coming from a trusted source.

What are the best market research tools for surveys?

Survey monkey is considered the best online market research tool for surveys, but key players like Typeform and Zoho follow closely behind. Budget and features usually determine the right tool for your needs.

What are the best free market research tools?

The best free tools for market research include: Answer the Public, Think with Google, Similarweb lite, SurveyMonkey’s basic plan, and Hootsuite’s free plan.

What are the best market research tools for qualitative research?

Qualitative research includes things like focus groups, open-ended surveys, case studies, and observation research. As such, the best tool for online research like this would be something like BIT.ai’s documentation and collaboration tool. Another useful tool for qualitative market research would be an online survey provider, like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms.

What are the best market research tools for quantitative research?

As this type of research is focused more on numbers, the best quantitative market research tools include things like Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence and Tableau. Each performs a different function but works together to collect, analyze, and present data in the most useful way possible.

by Liz March

Digital Research Specialist

Liz March has 15 years of experience in content creation. She enjoys the outdoors, F1, and reading, and is pursuing a BSc in Environmental Science.

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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.

Seeing is believing! Check out Crayon for yourself.

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15 Top Market Research Tools & Software (2024)

In this guide, we’ll cover the 17 best free and paid market research software tools that you can use right now. 

From data collection to conducting one-on-one interviews with key members of your audience, these tools can make the market research process more effective and efficient.

1. Statista

Statista is a statistics portal that also offers customized market research reports. 

To quickly find relevant reports, type in a keyword (like “beverages”) and Statista will produce a list of results.

The information you can get from Statista makes it easy to gauge an industry’s:

• Trend direction
• Consumer behavior

These critical signals can help you decide whether or not to invest or expand into that market.

Statista data comes from three primary sources:

• 49% of the data comes from Statista’s original research (the company employs over 100 data analysts)
• 16% comes from publicly accessible data sources
• 35% is obtained through unique data partnerships, such as with market research institutions

You can even opt to talk to one of Statista’s professional researchers to get further help and insights during your market research process.

It is important to note, though, that the quality of data you find on Statista may vary. This is because a number of the reports—particularly the free ones—are based on public data.

Who Should Use Statista?

Statista is useful for investors seeking their next opportunity, as well as business leaders who want to better understand the competitive landscape.

How Much Does Statista Cost?

Much of Statista’s data is available for free. For advanced insights and reports, you can purchase a paid plan. Options start at $199 per month; you can also purchase single, comprehensive reports for $495.

2. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting tool. 

Knowing about a trend before it takes off is the holy grail of market research. The problem, though, is that most trend analysis is highly subjective and based on someone’s best guess about what may take off in the future. 

We built Exploding Topics to solve this problem by identifying trends based on big data. 

The flagship feature is our Trends Database, which contains over 750,000 trending topics across 30+ industries like fashion, finance, tech, marketing, pets, beauty, and more. 

When you view a trend in our database, you’ll see a graph of the trend’s historical search volume. This can help you gauge a topic’s popularity and stability. Users on our Investor and Business plans can also see a forecast of the trend’s projected growth: 

We source our data through social listening—tracking what’s being discussed on:

• Social media
• Business websites
• News media sites

By using a mix of artificial intelligence and human data analysis, we rapidly gather this trend data and qualify it to identify the most popular topics.

We update our database with this information every day, so you’re always getting the most up-to-date trend data.

Exploding Topics also offers a handful of other helpful tools that you can use for market research, too. These include our:

• Trend Search : While our core database is great for discovering new trends, the search feature is useful if you already know what you want to see data about. It’s a good alternative to Google Trends.
• Meta Trends : If you want to see the products and brands that are currently riding a trend wave, you can do so by using our Meta Trends feature.
• Trending Startups : Investors can use the Trending Startups list to identify new and rapidly growing companies in any category.
• Trending Products : When you’re interested in expanding your reach or offerings, the Trending Products feature helps you identify hot products that are currently seeing rapid growth.

Who Should Use Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is great for investors, entrepreneurs, marketers, and business leaders who need to understand what the competition looks like right now —and how it might change in the near future.

How Much Does Exploding Topics Cost?

You can view much of our basic trend data for free right now. To unlock all our data, as well as extra features like our lists of trending products and startups, you’ll need a paid plan.

Options start at $39 per month (billed annually), and you can get a two-week trial of any paid plan for just $1.

3. Market Finder

Market Finder is a free Google tool that makes it easy to discover international markets that are ripe for expansion. 

Rather than uncovering specific trends, Market Finder shows you new regions and demographics with strong potential for future growth.

It has two primary tools:

• Dive into new markets : This feature walks you through a quick quiz that identifies your industry and collects some specifications about your company. Then, it shows you which companies would be ideal for expansion based on data from Google Ads, search volume, and household income.
• Test export readiness : Enter your URL in this tool; it’ll analyze your readiness for expansion based on marketing performance (international traffic, e-commerce capabilities, etc.), operational abilities (payment fit, localization capabilities, etc.) and competitive position (category demand).

If you have Google Analytics set up, then Market Explorer can pull data directly from the Google Analytics dashboard for increased accuracy.

Who Should Use Market Explorer?

If you’d like to expand your business and find marketing opportunities in new regions, then Market Explorer is a useful tool. It’s also a good choice for investors who would like to identify new regions in which they can seek potential investment opportunities.

How Much Does Market Explorer Cost?

Market Explorer is free to use.

4. Census Business Builder

The Census Business Builder is a tool that allows brick-and-mortar business owners to explore new geographic markets.

You can use the tool to search by zip code, town, or state and see metrics like:

• Average household income
• Typical education level

The Census Business Builder also has advanced filters that can provide valuable, detailed insights based on the type of business you’re launching.

For example, if you’re opening a fast casual restaurant, you can use the “Consumer Spending” filter and see how much people spend on alcoholic beverages and dining out in a selected region.

You’ll still need to turn Census Business Builder data into actionable insights, though. Once you do, it can be a valuable tool for deciding where to open a new retail establishment.

Who Should Use The Census Business Builder?

Retailers and restaurateurs interested in expanding to new markets can use this tool to find a hot spot. It’s also a useful tool for investors who would like to identify markets for potential investment opportunities.

How Much Does The Census Business Builder Cost?

It’s entirely free.

5. Grand View Research

Grand View Research is a research and consulting company that also offers market reports across a variety of industries. 

Most of their market research reports provide statistics like market size, compounding annual growth rate, market breakdown by sectors, and competitive analysis.

Grand View's paid offering allows you to segment the data to find more specific metrics (i.e., only data for the Japanese pet market).

In addition to the free reports, Grand View Research also offers custom research services, and you can talk to one of their analysts for personalized assistance.

Who Should Use Grand View Research?

The company’s reports and services are useful for entrepreneurs who want to launch a business, existing business leaders interested in finding new opportunities, and investors looking for high-growth markets.

How Much Does Grand View Research Cost?

You can access limited data about many of Grand View Research’s reports for free; licensing a full report can cost over $3,000. You can also opt to use the company’s self-service market research portal, Horizon Databook , and get additional data points for free.

SpyFu is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool for keyword research and competitive analysis. 

The platform’s various features make it easy to discover the marketing strategies used by top players in your market or industry. Type in any URL, and you’ll be able to find metrics like:

• Total search traffic
• Search rankings
• Current Google Ads
• Pay per click (PPC) ads history
• Paid keywords

You can then use this data to learn more about one of your top competitors or look at several companies in order to better understand a new market.

Who Should Use SpyFu?

Marketers and business leaders can use SpyFu to better understand who their competitors are—and how much they need to spend on marketing in order to be competitive.

Investors can also use SpyFu to research how potential investment targets are investing in marketing (and what kind of growth they’re seeing as a result.)

How Much Does SpyFu Cost?

You can see a limited amount of SpyFu data for free. Paid plans, which give you access to more features, start at $33 per month when billed annually.

7. Crunchbase

The platform makes it easy to find data like how much money a startup has raised to date, who’s investing in a growing business, or who founded a key industry player.

You can also see other data points through Crunchbase, including acquisition and employee headcount.

To use Crunchbase for market research, just type in an industry and filter results by the type of data you’re seeking. Crunchbase will show you a list of companies that meet the defined criteria.

You can also type in a specific company or competitor name and locate data that way, too.

Who Should Use Crunchbase?

Crunchbase is a valuable tool for nearly everyone involved in business management and funding.

• Entrepreneurs can use the tool to explore new markets and find potential investors.
• Business leaders can keep tabs on competitor growth and relevant industry acquisitions.
• VC firms and investors can monitor how others are investing in growing companies, or explore the investment potential in a new market.

How Much Does Crunchbase Cost?

You can see limited information for free; full Crunchbase access starts at $49 per month (billed annually).

Awario is a social media monitoring and brand tracking tool. 

You can use Awario for market research by tracking specific terms on social media. These can include:

• Brand names
• Product keywords
• Industry influencers’ names

For example, if you’re considering building or investing in a mobile app for sleep tracking, you can easily monitor brand names like Oura or keywords like “sleep tracker”.

This makes it easy to see key industry conversations and glean valuable insights about your ideal buyer persona. You can also identify potential gaps in the market.

Awario even tracks sentiment analysis to see how people feel about various competitors in your target industry.

Who Should Use Awario?

Awario is useful for marketers who want to understand their audience’s frustrations or needs, as well as entrepreneurs and product developers interested in using customer data to improve business offerings.

How Much Does Awario cost?

Awario access starts at $29 per month, billed annually.

G2 is a popular software review website. 

It’s a great resource for quickly finding quantitative and qualitative data about virtually any software market.

The G2 review structure is helpful as it consists of the following questions:

• What do you like best about (product)?
• What do you dislike about (product)?
• What problems is (product) solving and how is that benefiting you?

This customer experience data is a goldmine for investors and startup founders as it makes it easy to spot gaps in a market and understand key pain points that customers are trying to solve.

Plus, G2 provides a list of competitors for each product—useful for identifying related companies to research.

When browsing G2, you can see details about each reviewer including their:

• Business size

This is all useful for accurately identifying your market’s target demographic. You can also filter a product’s reviews by any of those categories.

The platform makes an effort to ensure that the customer feedback is legitimate by allowing users to verify themselves and even marking incentivized reviews.

Who Should Use G2?

G2 is useful for entrepreneurs and product marketers who want to identify and fill gaps in a market. It’s also a good tool for investors who want to learn more about how real users feel about a potential investment target.

The platform only contains software reviews, though. If you’re looking for reviews of other products and companies, you’ll need to find an alternate source (such as Amazon reviews for consumer goods).

How Much Does G2 Cost?

G2 is free for users to browse reviews, though it offers other paid plans for marketers and investors.

10. Prisync

Prisync is a competitor price tracking tool. 

Its automated features make Prisync a great choice for e-commerce entrepreneurs. Use it to:

• Track competitor product pricing and fluctuations
• Estimate customer demand for certain products
• Get price change updates multiple times a day
• Automatically apply dynamic pricing to your own e-commerce storefront

While Prisync is usually best for e-commerce stores that have already launched, you can also use its competitive analysis features to track pricing trends for top players in any market.

For example, in addition to tracking real-time price fluctuations, Prisync also has a price history tracking feature that provides insight into how prices are trending over time, which helps you identify volatility in the market.

Who Should Use Pricsync?

Prisync is most useful for e-commerce startups that want to stay up-to-date with the latest pricing and product trends.

How Much Does Prisync Cost?

Prisync plans start at $99 per month, and pricing depends on the number of products you track. Some features are restricted to higher price tiers, including dynamic pricing, daily email notifications, and API access.

11. Respondent

Respondent is a market research platform for recruiting audience panels.

You can use the Respondent service to find vetted audience members that match your ideal target. Submit a request detailing who you want to talk to—such as CFOs and healthcare companies—and Respondent will find people for you.

You can opt to either talk to these people on one-to-one calls (ideal for getting real-time insights) or run group surveys through Respondent.

Who Should Use Respondent?

Respondent is useful for business leaders and entrepreneurs trying to find the right product-market fit for both B2B and B2C audiences. Investors can use Respondent too—it can be a way to research a particular target market before making an investment.

How Much Does Respondent Cost?

Respondent pricing is based on credits. One credit equals one participant in your interview or survey.

Pricing starts at $24 per B2C credit or $40 per B2B credit. These prices vary based on the total number of credits you purchase. However, you’ll also need to factor in separate incentive payments to respondents. Respondent’s incentive calculator can help you estimate this amount.

12. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a user-friendly tool for building market research surveys 

You can choose from multiple survey templates and question types, including:

• NPS surveys
• Product testing surveys
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Matrix questions
• Open-ended questions
• Rating scales
• Multiple choice questions

If you don’t have an audience to survey, you can use SurveyMonkey’s audience panel service that distributes your survey to a specific demographic.

To use these audience panels, you’ll need to know a few details about your target market—such as “stay-at-home moms with a household income of at least $50,000.” SurveyMonkey will take care of the rest.

It’s important to note, though, that these audiences are fairly broad, such as “college graduates” or “smartphone owners” who meet a few other demographic criteria. If you need highly specific audience curation, you may want to work with a market research firm .

No matter what distribution method you choose, you’ll get to use SurveyMonkey’s drag-and-drop builder to put together questions in your preferred order.

Who Should Use SurveyMonkey?

SurveyMonkey is great for market researchers that want to learn more about a target audience group, as well as business owners and marketing professionals seeking feedback from their existing customers.

How Much Does SurveyMonkey Cost?

You can build limited surveys for free, though they’ll include SurveyMonkey branding. To unlock additional features, you’ll need a paid plan.

SurveyMonkey’s paid plans start at $39 per month, billed annually. You can also request audience responses for $1 each, with a minimum of 200 responses per survey.

Attest is another online survey software option. 

Like Respondent, Attest provides an audience for you to survey. All you need to do is provide demographic information about who you're targeting, and the questions you want to ask.

Attest can assemble audiences from a pool of over 125 million consumers around the world.

The company then uses a mix of AI scanning and human oversight to review the data collected by your attest survey. This is to improve the reliability and consistency of your data.

Attest won't turn your data into insights, though—once you get your results, you'll have to use other tools to help with the analysis.

Who Should Use Attest?

Attest is useful for business leaders or marketers who want to get audience insights or user feedback—without an existing customer base to survey.

Investors could also use Attest to learn more about consumer preferences and habits in a market.

How Much Does Attest Cost?

Attest offers three plans based on usage, but they don't publish their prices online. You'll need to get in touch with the company and request a quote.

14. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an audience survey tool.

The platform makes it easy to set up questionnaires that appear on your website at different intervals during a visitor's journey.

Companies can use Qualaroo to gather more information about things like:

• Visitor needs and motivations
• App or website user decisions
• Purchase decisions
• Products for sale

You can target website visitors based on time of day, location, and more. This makes it possible to research specific groups of visitors—useful for building or verifying audience personas.

You can also use Qualaroo to collect focus group feedback about website and app prototypes before you launch them.

The company doesn’t provide audiences for you, though, so you’ll need to have a group that you can survey. If not, you’ll be better served by a tool like Attest or Respondent.

Who Should Use Qualaroo?

Any business leader or entrepreneur in need of audience data can use Qualaroo to get feedback from real customers and leads, build out audience surveys, plan marketing campaigns, and more.

How Much Does Qualaroo Cost?

Qualaroo's free plan allows users to collect up to 50 survey responses a month for free. If you want higher usage limits, you'll need to subscribe to a paid plan.

The company's business tier plan costs $39.99 per month (or $19.99 per month when billed annually) per 100 responses.

You'll be billed extra for any month in which you go over 100 responses; the total cost depends on volume.

15. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI chat assistant that can help you plan for and analyze market research efforts.

There are several ways that ChatGPT is useful during the market research process, including:

• Reviewing information about your target audience and creating survey questions
• Processing and analyzing data collected from tools like Attest or SurveyMonkey
• Analyzing, summarizing, and answering questions about data-heavy PDF reports
• Creating customer persona documents

If you have a ChatGPT Plus plan, you can even train your own GPT to produce the analysis or content that you need. It's possible to save and reuse these GPTs so they can speed up your workflow, too.

All generative AI tools do carry a risk of inaccuracies, though, so you’ll want to make sure to double-check ChatGPT’s outputs before using them or feeding information back into another market research tool.

Who Should Use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can be a useful tool for anyone conducting market research manually, whether that involves sorting through data, writing questions, or segmenting audiences to survey.

How Much Does ChatGPT Cost?

It's free to use ChatGPT, though you may run into some feature limitations. You'll also have to use a slightly older version of the GPT AI, which can lead to more errors.

To customize your experience and get more tools for document analysis, you'll need a ChatGPT Plus plan starting at $20 per month.

16. Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop is a user experience (UX) research tool.

The platform facilitates research, data collection, and data visualization through:

• Card sort tests
• First click tests

Card sort tests are the most useful for teams interested in gathering market research data. By presenting a sample audience with examples of products and categories—and then asking them to group and rank each item—you can get a sense of:

• What your target audience is and is not interested in
• How your potential customers think about products and categories of items
• Whether certain colors, terms, and images are more appealing than others

You could run these card sort tests with actual products that you sell or with ones you’re considering creating or adding to your inventory.

Who Should Use Optimal Workshop?

Marketers and business leaders can use Optimal Workshop’s card sort tests to evaluate how members of a new market or audience think about products—and what their preferences are.

How Much Does Optimal Workshop Cost?

Optimal Workshop plans start at $191 per user, per month (billed annually), with a minimum of three users. Because of this, it’s best suited for organizations that plan to conduct UX research after moving through market research and card testing.

17. AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked is a tool that produces frequently asked questions on any topic.

The way it works is simple—type in a phrase, set your language and location, and see related questions that people are typing into search engines.

Questions display in tree format, so you can see how different queries relate to each other. One click on any group of questions opens up a new tree, so you can dig down even further into related subtopics.

Who Should Use AlsoAsked?

AlsoAsked is useful for anyone who’s conducting preliminary market research. Because you can adjust results by location and language, you can use AlsoAsked to get a feel for:

• What people want to know about a topic, product, or service
• Whether their questions increase, decrease, or change based on location
• How a market’s concerns, interests, and queries change along with language

You won’t be able to do all of your market research in AlsoAsked, but it can give you ideas for survey questions to ask, industry trends to track, and more.

How Much Does AlsoAsked Cost?

AlsoAsked is free to use, though you’re limited to three searches per day. To raise usage limits, bring up increasingly detailed results, and unlock multiple export formats, you’ll need a paid plan. Options start at $12 per month when billed annually.

If you’re new to the market research process, then these tools will help you set benchmarks, get key consumer insights, and collect data for decision making. But even the best market research tool can only go so far—you also need to have a solid understanding of the research process and key industry shifts.

To make sure that you’re getting the most out of your preferred research solution, check out our guide to conducting research for new product development —and look at the biggest trends in market research happening right now.

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The 19 Best Market Research Tools Of 2024

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 $1169/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
• Team plans start at $920/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 $199/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $299/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $499/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 $39/month for Basic, $79/month for Professional.

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 $129/month for Lite, $249/month for Standard, $449/month for Advanced, and $14,990/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 $89/month for Standard, $199/month for the Growth tier, and $549/month for Pro (billed annually).
• Agency plans start at $209/month for Standard, $429/month for Growth, and $859/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 $199/month for Standard, $299/month for Professional, and $399/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 $549/month for Personal (billed annually), $959 for Professional (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 $99/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 $139.95/month for Pro, $249.95/month for Guru, and $499.95/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 $179-199/month for Rapid Insights, $358-399/month for Pro, and $533-599/month for Enterprise (price depending on whether it’s billed monthly or 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 ...

15 Best market research tools in 2024

Last updated

3 April 2024

Reviewed by

Whether you're launching a new product or service, looking to increase customer engagement, or boosting brand loyalty, it’s always necessary to turn to data and insights to understand what’s going on. This research can give a picture of current and potential customers in the marketplace and help validate an action you want to take to increase sales.

Fortunately, we’ve done the hard work to find some of the best research tools to use in 2023. Let’s explore!

Market analysis template

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

• What are market research tools?

Market research tools are designed to simplify the process of gathering, storing, and understanding data and information.

They can help a team to clearly identify a market for their product or service, as well as gain key feedback from current and potential customers .

A broad range of market research tools is useful at various stages of the research process. Some tools help speed up the process of gathering data. Others are helpful once you’ve collected data, as they allow you to easily view and manage information and then draw valuable insights.

Ultimately, market research tools can help make the research process easier and more straightforward.

• Why are market research tools important for business?

The right market research tools in a business can streamline the research phases while helping to ensure a new product or service succeeds. 

There are a range of ways market research tools can help businesses. These include: 

Reducing manual processes . Manual research tasks can be highly time-consuming for teams. Tools can reduce the time it takes to complete research tasks, helping move projects forwards.

Increased accuracy . With large amounts of data, it’s easy for people to make mistakes. The wrong insights, after all, can prove highly damaging for a business. However, the right tool can improve the accuracy of data collected, ensuring that you base your decision-making on facts.

Removes bias . When teams rely too heavily on assumptions, they miss the chance to discover what users are really thinking and feeling. By relying more on market research tools, you reduce bias from team members and gain clarity on what the research is showing.

Faster data collection . Collecting data can take a long time and involve multiple team members. With the use of tools, there’s the chance to automate many tasks, making the process much faster and simpler.

Better accessibility . Outsourcing market research to independent firms can be time-consuming and costly. However, a business might not have the resources to conduct, collate, and draw meaningful insights from research. Market research tools better enable businesses to conduct research without person power—making the process accessible even to a small business.

• Types of market research tools

Market research tools are becoming increasingly common. Choosing the right tool(s) will depend largely on your needs, goals, and overall business strategy.

Before deciding, it’s helpful to consider the different types of tools and how they might help your research.

The most common types of research tools include:

Customer relationship management (CRM) software

CRM tools record key customer data to help build a picture of customer engagement and loyalty. This is very useful as a deep understanding of your customers is essential when releasing new products , services, and features.

Survey tools

Surveys are one of the most common research techniques, as they help a business team deeply understand what customers want and need. Survey tools can hasten the process of gathering data, increase the chances of completion, and improve accuracy.

Data analysis software

Data tools can help you efficiently collect and store data. They’re also helpful for analyzing that data and quickly gaining valuable insights from a vast range of sources.

Social media monitoring

Social tools help businesses to draw insights about social campaigns and statistics to drive interest online. They can also analyze trends and allows teams to understand their current and potential customers better.

Competitive intelligence tools

Competitor tools help a team to understand what their competitors are doing. By analyzing competitors' profits, sales, trends, and customers, you gain a better chance to understand market needs and wants, giving you the opportunity to offer something new and innovative.

Business intelligence tools

To help businesses plan more accurately, business intelligence tools help with forecasting, goal setting, and business strategies. 

• The best market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Below are some of the best market research tools in 2023.

Accurate market and consumer data should drive business decisions—not assumptions made by teams.

That’s where Statista can help. Statista is an online platform focused on consumer and market data. With access to data from 150+ countries and regions, their market insights help stakeholders to forecast growth, revenue, sales, and more. 

You can also find trending statistics, current popular topics, and expert research, which can all build a deep understanding of your market. 

Statista offers their starter plan at $39 per month, though they do have a free introduction plan to allow users to get to know the platform first. 

SurveyMonkey

Surveys are an important market research tool. They give your customers, or potential customers, a chance to make their voices heard. Those insights are ones a business can act upon to make improvements and release better products or services. 

SurveyMonkey enables business teams to quickly create and send surveys, quizzes, and polls through email, web links, or embedded forms. From there, they can receive responses from key people, gain insights, and take action on feedback. 

The platform has hundreds of templates to choose from, meaning that you don’t have to build a survey from scratch or need any design nous to get started. 

SurveyMonkey also offers a free option, which caps surveys at ten questions. This is an attractive option for small businesses and teams wanting to start conducting surveys. 

Google Trends

Curious about what people are or aren’t interested in at the moment? Jumping on trends and creating things that are wanted now is one important way to secure market share. 

Google Trends is a tool that anyone from a journalist to a business founder or UX Specialist can benefit from. It visualizes what search terms people are using on the internet, almost in real time.

The tool has featured insights, a search engine option to see what’s currently popular, and the chance to dive deeper into data. You can also compare one topic to another to see the interest over time—with information dating back to 2004. 

Regardless of what you’re developing, Google Trends is a tool every team releasing new products can benefit from. Even better, it’s a free tool, making it accessible to all. 

Marketing revenue engine SpyFu helps businesses to understand and take the guesswork out of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. 

Through competitor analysis , rank tracking, and keyword research, SpyFu helps companies create content with better SEO. And with a Google Ads analyzer, ad templates, and competitor analysis, they can also boost success with marketed ads. 

SpyFu also has competitor software that allows customers to see ranks, ads, backlinks, and keywords to better understand the competition. To help stakeholders to track and improve success, they also provide detailed reporting tools. 

Basic plans for SpyFu start at $16 per month with options to upgrade for greater access. 

Designed with public relations professionals and content marketers in mind, BuzzSumo enables users to see what’s in the news, find trends, track company mentions, and gain ideas for new content. 

The tool helps people to discover popular content, uncover top stories from competitors, and see what their customers are interested in. It also allows stakeholders to quickly react to negative mentions, competitors' comments, or industry announcements. 

With a huge library of data and content, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool popular with creatives and marketers alike. 

The tool does come at a price, with a single-user plan costing ​​$119 per month. 

Think With Google

Think With Google provides key data and insight to help businesses understand shifts in beliefs, behaviors, and needs in geographic regions. 

These consumer insights and market trends can provide interesting perspectives for the forecasting and planning of marketing strategies.  

Using Think With Google can boost business ideas, drive business decisions, and help marketers succeed in a competitive marketplace. And similar to Google Trends, Think With Google is a free tool. 

Completing a survey isn’t always a fun or desirable activity for a busy potential or current customer. Surveys take time to fill out, and many customers would prefer to get on with their day. 

With that in mind, Typeform created people-friendly surveys, forms, and quizzes that are enjoyable to complete. 

With dedicated designs that aren’t only aesthetically pleasing but simple to use, stakeholders can create something unique and appealing for consumers without the need for design work. 

Typeform also has a video feature to allow more in-depth questions—something that can be very useful for some projects. 

A basic plan with Typeform starts at $25 per month. 

Semrush helps companies improve their SEO, PPC, competitor research, and content marketing. 

It does this by offering SEO audits, actionable tips, traffic analysis, and a keyword research tool to drive successful marketing. It’s also a social media scheduling tool with post analysis to boost successful social marketing. 

When it comes to competitor research, Semrush also provides competitor analysis through tracking and assessing other websites, visibility on competitor promotion strategies, and access to keyword and backlink gaps, which you can use to grow market share. 

Semrush’s base plans start at $119.95 per month. 

US Census Bureau

When developing new products and services, you want to get as much information about your target market as possible. What better way than looking at the Census Bureau data? 

The Census data gives accurate and detailed information about the American public and economy, which is critical to understanding the potential market for a product or service. This sort of data gives you the ‘big picture’ of your customer base and is often the backbone or initial supporting data for your market research project . Participation in the US Census is mandatory, ensuring that you have access to a huge dataset of accurate information. 

It does have some limitations. Given the Census is only taken every ten years, the information can become outdated quickly. Also, it may not be specific or detailed enough to relate to your particular project. 

But given it’s free for all to access, it’s a great starting point for general research. 

Competitor analysis is an essential part of any successful market research journey. Similarweb allows users to analyze any website or app to understand how competitors are positioning themselves in the market by measuring their digital traffic. 

Insights include total visits, global rank, country rank, pages per visit, and bounce rate. Within the platform, you can also easily find similarly ranked sites to compare and contrast to your own. 

Importantly, Similarweb provides traffic and engagement analysis with demographic information, other visited websites, and audience interests. This provides a vast amount of information to accurately compare your website and app with competitors, giving you a much clearer picture of what your customers are interested in and where you stand in the marketplace.

Similarweb offers plenty of free tools and business quotes for those interested in paid plans. 

Business intelligence tool, Tableau, is designed to help companies gain helpful insights from data. Those insights can drive business decisions, generate accurate planning, and improve forecasting. 

A visual analytics platform, the tool is useful for data management, visual storytelling, and collaboration between team members. 

With a dedicated dashboard, providing a range of key analytics, discovering how your business is performing (and where it could do better) is straightforward. They also offer end-to-end data for a complete picture. 

Individual plans with Tableau start at $70 per month. 

Facebook Audience Insights

For some businesses, Facebook advertising drives campaigns, boosts sales, and grows customer engagement. 

Facebook Audience Insights help business owners discover more than just what their competitors are doing. The tool provides aggregated information to show data from those who are already connected to the business and another set to provide information about those generally on Facebook. This key information can drive awareness of new customers and increase the chances of boosting interest and growing a customer base.

Specifically, Facebook Audience Insights provides demographic information, key interests, and lifestyle data to build a picture of your current and potential customers . Even better, the tool is free to use. 

Question and answer platform, Quora, isn’t technically a research tool. Because it holds an incredible amount of information, it can help content marketers and product developers uncover key topics of interest. 

This platform is also free for everyone to use. 

BrandMentions

When wanting to increase brand loyalty and engagement—not only do you need an accurate tool to track that data—you also need to understand who’s talking about your business and where. 

BrandMentions does just that. The tool helps businesses manage their brand reputation, acquire new customers, and retain current ones, all while engaging with customers and key influencers.

With BrandMentions, it’s simpler to accurately measure the success of campaigns, track social media mentions and performance, measure brand performance, and monitor hashtags.

Plans with BrandMentions start at $99 per month.

The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Dovetail. Dovetail ensures that you can store customer research , feedback, and insights in one streamlined place—all to empower your team with accurate decision-making.

Regardless of whether the user data came through a survey, a focus group, usability testing , or product feedback, Dovetail also enables you to analyze your market research data and generate insights that can help you understand your customer and competition.

The platform also has templates for anything from analyzing competitors to gaining feedback or running an employee engagement survey . Dovetail can help you complete research that’ll have a real impact.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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16 market research tools and resources to help you think like your consumers

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So you need an online tool or resource to support your market research and help you understand consumer sentiments – but where do you start? How do you assess the different options? And what even counts as a good tool or resource in the first place?

If those questions sound familiar then relax, we just happen to have the lowdown on 16 market research tools and resources that can help you stay close to your target consumer. Let’s start with a quick definition of what we’re counting as a market research tool or resource.  

Market research tools and resources demystified

When it comes to market research, some tools are excellent for end-to-end insights (for example a consumer research platform like GWI), while others are great to dip in and out of to add flavor to your findings. But broadly speaking they all enable businesses to find markets, and/or understand how consumers feel about a product or service.

Common uses for market research tools and resources offered by companies like these include data analysis, social media monitoring, competitor intelligence, and predictive analytics, but that’s far from an exhaustive list.

The big benefit of using market research tools and resources to study a target audience’s perceptions, opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and reactions is that you can make better, more informed decisions based on data rather than intuition or experience. 

Must-have features of market research tools and resources

Choosing a market research tool or resource is a bit like hunting for the perfect banana in your local store. It needs to be ripe with features, firm enough to stand everyday handling, yet soft enough to adapt to your needs. While it’s impossible to draw up a definitive list of must-have features, the following is a good start: 

Quality and variety Look for a tool/resource with access to a wide range of reliable information sources and data types, such as quantitative, qualitative , behavioral, and attitudinal. It’s also important to check how fresh the platform’s data is; the more recent, the more trustworthy.

Analysis and visualization It’s incredibly helpful to be able to analyze and visualize data to identify patterns, trends, insights, and opportunities. It’s an added bonus to be able to slot charts and visuals straight into your pitch decks and proposals.

Integration and collaboration Compatibility with other marketing tools in your tech stack can be important, as are features to support collaboration with team members, clients, and partners. Look for smart sharing features and other integrations that’ll help you embed the tool into your daily workflow with ease. 

Security and compliance You want a tool that can store and transmit data safely, that allows you to control the access and permissions of the data, and complies with local regulations. 

Scalability and affordability The best market research tools and resources adapt to your changing needs, have a transparent pricing model, and provide a good return on investment. It’s always a good idea to opt for a tool/resource that you can scale up and down in terms of seats, markets, and so on as your business grows.

Simplicity and support The final thing to consider is the tool/resource’s ease-of-use and the helpfulness of its team. Reliable, friendly customer support can, and often does, make all the difference.

16 must-know market research tools and resources for better consumer insights

GWI is a global consumer research platform that offers instant access to data on the views, behaviors, and interests of nearly 3 billion consumers in 53 countries.

GWI’s platform is the go-to starting point for organizations large and small when it comes to end-to-end market research – by which we mean finding their ideal audience, getting to know them, and understanding their interests and behaviors. Using that information, organizations can fine-tune their thinking by using other tools mentioned below.

Specialisms GWI excels in revealing exactly what drives buyers, giving users the answers they need, just when they need them. In addition to our flagship consumer data survey – our specialist data sets cover the US, alcohol, automotive, consumer tech, gaming, luxury, sports, travel, work, kids, and more.

Best for Fast, intuitive, and powerful end-to-end market research and consumer sentiment tracking. 

2. Statista

Statista is a data aggregator, collecting insights from various sources. They provide market, company, and consumer data, operating in 13 locations worldwide and providing statistics and forecasts on 80,000 different topics from 170 industries and 150 countries. 

Specialisms The Statista platform supports market analysis and forecasting, data analysis, product and price research, concept testing, and user experience research. It’s equally adept at tracking, positioning and image studies, advertising and PR analysis, target group profiling, and satisfaction surveys.

Best for Grabbing quick stats on a wide range of topics.

3. Qualtrics

Qualtrics’ software powers over 1B surveys every year, providing customers with answers to their market, brand, customer, and product questions. Customers can design their own surveys using Qualtrics’ drag-and-drop survey tool, library of 100+ question types, and pre-built survey templates.

Specialisms Qualtrics divide their offer into six specialist solutions. Contact Center is designed to reduce churn and drive loyalty, Market Research delivers the consumer insights, while CX Professional focuses on the customer journey, uncovering opportunity, and driving organizational outcomes. Human Resources is designed to pinpoint key drivers of engagement, Digital helps users understand the end-to-end experience across all digital channels, while Product Management aims to improve product market fit.

Best for Designing tailored surveys that get to the crux of what customers think. 

4. Google Trends

Google Trends is a good example of a resource that supports market research by giving users a feel for what’s being searched for in which market, rather than being used to perform market research itself. Users can search by geographic location, time frame, and by category for more granular results.

Specialisms Google Trends specializes in showing what people are searching for, in real time. That data helps Google Trends users measure search interest in a particular topic, in a particular place, and at a particular time. The Google Trends homepage shows what topics are trending right now, enabling users to explore and gauge interest in virtually any topic. Best for A high-level view of what’s trending to help gauge interest in a topic.

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that aims to transform the way people use data to solve problems, empowering individuals and organizations to make the most of their data. Basically, Tableau turns data into insights, using AI to accelerate decision-making and eliminate repetitive tasks. They describe their service as “intelligent analytics at scale.” 

Specialisms As an end-to-end data and analytics platform, Tableau specializes in driving better business outcomes with fully-integrated data management and governance, visual analytics and data storytelling, and collaboration. 

Best for Plugging in a brand’s own data to create visualizations that can aid decision making.

6. Typeform

Typeform allows users to create custom forms, surveys, and polls that collect more and better audience data. Their free plan – incredibly useful for any organization just starting out in market research – enables users to create unlimited forms, access 3,000+ templates, and collect responses.

Specialisms Typeform – and you might not be surprised to hear this – is all about forms. They specialize in tools that make it easy to build and customize mobile-optimized forms, then embed them where people see them to boost participation.

Best for Plans start at just £21 so Typeform is great for brands who don’t want to break the bank while gathering insights.

Loop11 is a UX tool for designers, marketers and product managers that gathers feedback on website experiences and usability, with no coding or usability knowledge required. 

Specialisms Loop11 specializes in user testing and digital product optimizations based on an unlimited number of tasks, questions and test duration. Users can test on desktop, mobile, and tablet​, create and share highlight clips and timestamped notes, and get UX metrics for faster analysis and insights​.

Best for Testing or gathering research on different designs or prototypes before making a decision.

8. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is a SaaS-based online survey creator, producing results its developers claim are 10x more valuable than email surveys. Embedded in websites or apps, Qualaroo surveys can target subjects based on their specific actions and behavioral patterns, making it easy to survey specific users while they’re directly engaged with a product, service or brand. 

Specialisms Specialist features include pre-built templates, multiple question types, advanced targeting options, customizable design, intelligent data mining, and multi-channel support. Qualaroo’s Nudge technology enables users to ask the right questions at the right time without being intrusive. Based on years of research, key findings, and optimizations, Nudge can learn a site’s structure to improve response rates over time.

Best for Brands looking to gather quick, unobtrusive feedback on how a product functions and why customers like it.

Temper uses embeddable widgets – most notably the familiar “sad”, “neutral” and “happy” face clickable icons – to measure customer sentiment. The aim is to identify successes to build on – and shortcomings to improve – using feedback and evidence.

Specialisms Temper has three modes that reflect its specialisms. In Tab mode it shows up at the bottom of every web page, helping businesses gauge how satisfied users are with an entire site. In Inline mode Temper is placed on specific web pages that businesses need to gather feedback on. Finally, in Email mode Temper is included at the end of emails, helping assess customer support interactions.

Best for Brands that want to measure customer mood to spot frustrating experiences or highlight problematic areas of a site or product.

10. BrandMentions

By continually analyzing the most important channels on the web and social media, BrandMentions keeps users informed by monitoring online mentions of brands, competitors and people. 

Specialisms BrandMentions specializes in helping businesses get closer to their customers and key influencers. The result helps businesses acquire and retain customers, create products that meet their exact needs, and manage their brand reputation by always being aware of who’s saying what about their brand.

Best for Brands who want an easy way to keep on top of brand monitoring, reputation management, and business Intelligence.

11. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey describe themselves as “a global leader in free and paid online surveys”. Typical audiences include employees, customers and target markets, although SurveyMonkey works equally well for any group with an online presence. 

Specialisms SurveyMonkey’ specializes in collecting feedback, with over 300 sets of questions optimized for different survey types. SurveyMonkey Audience is a trusted panel of more than 175 million international respondents able to deliver international market insights in as little as an hour. SurveyMonkey Genius brings together AI, survey experts, and machine learning to develop survey intelligence. Best for Anyone without detailed survey experience or who’s time-poor, as everything is templated and therefore quick and easy to use.

12. Answer the public

AnswerThePublic is a free keyword generator tool that lets users see the questions and ideas people are searching for – making it great for any organization taking their first steps with market research. As they put it: “AnswerThePublic listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around your keyword.”

Specialisms Users get three free searches per day, or they can upgrade to a Pro plan for unlimited searches. A useful pro-only specialist feature is Search Listening Alerts, which is a weekly email digest showing what new questions are being asked online around any topic.

Best for Seeing what’s trending in organic search, so brands can build strategies and campaigns around the most important questions being asked on Google.

13. Make My Persona

Make My Persona is a free tool from Hubspot that’s essentially a buyer persona generator. It helps segment different types of customers a business wants to attract by clarifying key differences between groups within a target audience. As we’ve mentioned above, free is always great for any organization dipping their toes into market research.

Specialisms Make My Persona specializes in creating and sharing avatars quickly and easily, enabling users to visualize key differences between groups within their target audience. In the process it clarifies each persona’s goals, challenges, and day-to-day responsibilities, highlighting ways brands can overcome their obstacles and simplify their workflow.

Best for Getting a top level understanding of a brand’s audience for use as a springboard for ideas and/or more research.

14. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social media and content marketing tool that tracks media mentions, backlinks, and social shares. Used by thousands of businesses worldwide, BuzzSumo helps them create content, monitor their brand and industry, and discover growth opportunities.

Specialisms BuzzSumo’s specialisms include sparking content ideas by browsing topics, trends and forums, content research by scanning billions of articles and social posts for insights, influencer identification by finding creators with engaged audiences on Instagram, Twitter and the web, and mentions, trends and updates tracking. Best for Competitor intelligence, helping brands see what works – and what doesn’t – to optimize their marketing activity. 

15. Userlytics

Userlytics is a user experience (UX) and testing company that works with enterprises, governmental organizations, non-profits, agencies and startups to provide an all-in-one solution for remote user testing.

Specialisms Userlytics’ specialisms include AI-based synthesis and analysis of qualitative sessions, sentiment analysis, and using invisible observers for moderated studies. Their seamless “no download, no extension, no multiple tabs” UX testing easily integrates with prototyping platforms like Figma or AdobeXD.

Best for Testing, testing, and more testing, with multiple models from moderated, unmoderated and qualitative, to web usability, prototype and accessibility testing. 

16. NielsenIQ

Nielsen rebranded its data and analytics branch in January 2021 as NielsenIQ (NIQ). Today NIQ helps clients understand consumer buying behavior and reveal pathways to growth. Full disclosure: GWI currently has a fusion with Nielsen as part of our GWI USA data set. 

Specialisms NIQ in partnership with GfK offers Full View, a solution designed to provide a complete picture of consumer buying behavior combined with omnichannel coverage, data platforms, and predictive analytics.

Best for Brands that want to track shopping habits and purchase behavior, helping them understand what drives consumer activity across channels. 

Last words on market research tools

The end is nigh; if you’re looking for a new tool to gauge consumer sentiment or run market research, then this article should get you off to a great start.

As we mentioned earlier, we think GWI is right up there with the best. But we would say that, wouldn’t we? So we’ll let you be the judge.

Market research tools and resources FAQs

How do you do market analysis.

Classic market analysis is a six stage process: research your industry, investigate the competitive landscape, identify market gaps, define your target market, identify barriers to entry, and create a sales forecast.

What are market research methods?

All market research can be split into two broad areas: primary and secondary, otherwise known as field and desk. Effective ways to do market research include focus groups, surveys, consumer research with social media listening, interviews, experiments and field trials, observation, competitive analysis, and using public domain data.

Can market research tools and resources be used for product development?

Certainly. Market research can help you understand users’ needs when developing new products, as well helping to identify potential risks and market opportunities.  And while doing product development research, you could come across ideas that could improve other areas of your business.

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9 Excellent Free Market Research Tools

15 January 2015, Jonathan Saipe

There are now a plethora of online market research tools, many of which are free, or offer free and paid-for access. Whilst this isn’t an exhaustive list, we’ve suggested 9 great tools that publish market data, insight and intelligence – ideal if you’re a researcher, planner or marketer.

Whilst access to some of the data available on Statista.com is free, given the exclusivity and specificity of many statistics, a premium account is required to access much of the platform.

StatCounter Global Stats is provided by StatCounter – the free, online visitor stats tool. It publishes technical data, such as browser and operating system usage, and screen resolutions, for desktops, mobiles, tablets and consoles, across all countries.

Stats provided are based on aggregate data collected via more than 15 billion page views per month across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

Google’s Public Data explorer publishes animated charts and maps of public datasets including economic, social, health and population data. After a little getting used to, you will find data easy to explore and visualise. And as the charts animate over time, changes in world behaviour become easier to understand.

When setting up an ad campaign, you can segment your audience, at which point Facebook will publish the potential audience size, allowing you to evaluate marketing potential. This part of the process is free and you are not obliged to make your campaign(s) live.

LinkedIn’s ad programme allows marketers and researchers to access LinkedIn’s user data free of charge. With its focus on professionals, you will have access to a range of information including company categories, sizes or specific names, job titles or job categories by country or city. LinkedIn will publish your potential reach when you go through the process of setting up an ad campaign. As with Facebook, you are not obliged to make the ad campaign live at this point.

Worldometers is run by an international team of developers and researchers, publishing world statistics. It was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), and was chosen as content provider at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), BBC News, and the National Media Museum (UK) among others.

Whilst it doesn’t allow segmentation of data, its country specific data is a valuable resource. And the real-time data found of its home page is both fascinating and shocking! Go take a look.

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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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What Are the Best Market Research Tools: A Detailed List & Guide 2024

Expert Writer

Dwayne Charrington shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

Imagine you’re a chef whipping up a delicious dish, but you have no clue what your customers crave – the fiery kick of chili or the comforting sweetness of cinnamon?

That’s what researchers and surveyors face without the right market research tools. As a part of the survey industry for over two decades, I have often seen businesses experiencing this “lack of data” phenomenon.

But how do you choose the best tools for market research to collect the required data? Let’s cash in on my experience.

Best Tools & Software to Conduct Market Research

1. qualaroo : best for user & customer feedback surveys via website or app.

When I want to gather insightful user and customer feedback directly through my website or app, I always turn to Qualaroo. This is one of the best market research platforms I have used, and it integrates seamlessly with so many other tools, allowing me to deploy surveys that capture user sentiments in real time.

With its advanced targeting options , I can ask specific questions to the right audience, ensuring the feedback is relevant and actionable. I love how easy it is to design and launch surveys without needing any technical expertise.

Plus, its AI-powered sentiment analysis helps me interpret responses quickly, making it an invaluable asset for improving user experience and driving customer satisfaction.

What You Will Like:

• Smart branding and customization options to ensure a professional appearance in the surveys.
• Supports 70+ global languages , allowing surveys to be used around the world.
• It Integrates seamlessly with other platforms such as Zapier, Salesforce, Tableau and more for better data analysis.
• Advanced nudge feature for prototypes to get user insights quickly at every stage of the design process.
• Supports A/B testing to check different versions before you actually move forward.

What You May Not Like:

• A few more niche-specific templates would make the template library better.
• It does not support a dark mode on the website.

Pricing: A forever free plan for startups and small businesses with all premium features. Paid plans start at $19.99/month .

2. Similarweb : Best for Competitor Website Analysis

(Image Source: Similarweb)

For a deep dive into my competitors’ strategies, Similarweb is my go-to. This tool offers comprehensive insights into competitor website traffic, audience demographics, and engagement metrics.

I can see where their traffic is coming from, what keywords they’re ranking for, and even their top-performing pages. This level of detail helps me benchmark my own performance and identify new opportunities for growth.

The intuitive interface and robust data make it easy to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

• Offers detailed analysis of website engagement, audience demographics, and retention.
• Allows tracking of industry trends and market share changes.
• Features keyword analysis for SEO and paid search strategies.
• Supports API access for integrating data into custom applications.
• Provides custom dashboards for monitoring specific metrics or competitors.
• Can become costly as you scale up and require more detailed reports.
• Historical data is limited compared to some other market research tools.

Pricing: Start at $125 per month. Billed annually.

3. Glimpse : Best for Spotting Emerging Trends

(Image Source: MeetGlimpse)

Staying ahead of the curve is crucial, and Glimpse is the perfect market research software for spotting emerging trends. This tool leverages data from Google Trends to highlight what’s gaining traction before it becomes mainstream. It detects and analyzes fast-growing trends based on social media and web data.

It’s like having a crystal ball for market trends. I find it incredibly useful for identifying new content ideas and product opportunities and understanding consumer behavior shifts. Glimpse’s timely insights have often given me a competitive edge in my projects.

• Delivers timely notifications about new trends relevant to your industry.
• Allows for quick exploration of niche markets with less competition.
• Offers insights into consumer behavior changes in real time.
• Integrates with e-commerce platforms to test product ideas quickly.
• Provides data-driven recommendations for marketing and product development.
• Lacks the depth of data provided by more established market research tools.
• Mainly focuses on consumer goods and may not be as useful for B2B sectors.

Pricing: Custom pricing.

4. BuzzSumo: Best for Content Performance Analysis

(Image Source: BuzzSumo)

BuzzSumo is indispensable for analyzing how well content performs. Whether I’m looking at my own content or that of my competitors, BuzzSumo helps me understand what resonates with audiences.

It provides data on social shares, backlinks, and even influencer engagement. This tool is particularly valuable for refining my content strategy, as it highlights the types of content that generate the most buzz.

With BuzzSumo, I can ensure my content efforts are always impactful and aligned with audience interests.

• Allows users to discover the most shared content across major social platforms.
• Offers insights into the performance of specific content types, lengths, and formats.
• Supports content research with filters by date, language, and region.
• Includes influencer identification to help boost your marketing efforts.
• Delivers detailed backlink data to understand who is linking to and promoting your content.
• More focused on content performance, less on overall market trends.
• Some features, like historical data, are only available on higher-tier plans.

Pricing: Start at $159 per month. Billed annually.

5. AnswerThePublic : Best for Generating Content Ideas

(Image Source: PageTrafficBuzz)

When I’m in need of fresh content ideas, AnswerThePublic is my secret weapon. This tool visualizes search queries from Google and Bing, showing what people are curious about. It’s like having a direct line to my audience’s minds.

I use it to brainstorm blog topics, video content, and even product descriptions. The way it organizes data into questions, prepositions, and comparisons makes it incredibly easy to pinpoint exactly what content will meet my audience’s needs.

• Provides visualizations of search questions and prepositions related to keywords.
• Helps identify consumer concerns and queries surrounding specific topics.
• Offers quick download options for data in CSV format.
• Supports data collection from various regions and languages to tailor content globally.
• Enables SEO and content marketing teams to create highly targeted content.
• Focuses mainly on keyword-based queries, lacking broader market insights.
• Does not integrate with other marketing tools, requiring manual data management.

Pricing: Starts at $2.92 per month. Billed annually.

6. GrowthBar SEO : Best for Keyword Ranking Insights

(Image Source: Growth Bar SEO)

For in-depth keyword ranking insights, GrowthBar SEO has been my tool of choice. It provides detailed keyword metrics, including search volume, CPC, and ranking difficulty, right within my browser.

I particularly appreciate its ability to generate keyword suggestions and content ideas based on what’s already ranking well. This makes optimizing my content for SEO a breeze, helping me climb the search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to my site.

• Offers competitive analysis to see how your site stacks up against competitors.
• Includes a keyword research tool that suggests profitable keywords.
• Features a content outline generator to speed up content creation.
• Integrates with Google Analytics for a comprehensive view of your traffic.
• Offers a Chrome extension for instant SEO insights on any website you visit.
• Primarily suitable for small to medium-sized businesses, might not scale well for very large sites.
• Some users report occasional inaccuracies in data reporting.

Pricing: Starts at $20.30 per month. Billed annually.

7. Statista: Best for Accessing Statistical Data

(Image Source: Statista)

Statista is a treasure trove of statistical data, covering a vast array of topics. Whenever I need reliable data to back up my market research or reports, Statista is where I turn.

It offers access to a vast database of statistics, forecasts, dossiers, and infographics from over 22,500 sources. The quality and depth of data available help me make informed decisions and provide compelling evidence in my presentations and content.

• Offers customizable charts and graphs to visualize data easily.
• Includes data on a wide range of topics and industries worldwide.
• It supports downloading statistics in various formats for presentations and reports.
• Provides insights into market forecasts, consumer markets, and company data.
• Delivers frequent updates to data, ensuring information is current and relevant.
• Subscriptions can be expensive, particularly for full access to all features.
• Some niche industries or less popular topics may have less comprehensive data.

Pricing: Individual plan starts at $149 per month. Billed annually.

8. Think With Google: Best for Consumer Insights

(Image Source: Blogspot)

Think With Google is my top resource for consumer insights. It offers a wealth of research, trends, and data-driven insights from Google’s vast repository. I use it to understand shifting consumer behaviors, explore new market opportunities, and refine my marketing strategies.

The case studies and reports are particularly useful, providing practical examples and actionable takeaways that I can apply directly to my work.

• Offers a range of tools to analyze consumer trends, ad performance, and website insights.
• Integrates with other Google services for a unified approach to market research.
• Provides real-time data that helps marketers adjust their strategies quickly.
• Features tools specifically designed for mobile market analysis.
• Delivers insights based on large-scale data sets that Google has access to.
• Primarily focused on digital marketing, which may not cover all business needs.
• Data and tools are somewhat limited to the ecosystems of Google products.

Pricing: Free, but has limited survey features.

9. Google Keyword Tool: Best for Keyword Research

(Image Source: Backlinko)

For comprehensive keyword research, the Google Keyword Tool is indispensable. It offers detailed insights into keyword search volume, competition, and trends.

I use it to uncover new keyword opportunities and refine my SEO strategy. The tool’s integration with Google Ads also helps me plan and optimize my PPC campaigns, ensuring I target the right keywords for maximum impact.

• Offers extensive data on search volume, competition, and trends for keywords.
• Supports filtering by location, language, and search network.
• Helps in identifying long-tail keywords for niche marketing efforts.
• Provides historical data trends for better understanding seasonal variations in keyword popularity.
• Allows for the export of keywords and data for further analysis.
• Mainly useful for users with active Google Ads accounts.
• It focuses on PPC data, which may not always translate directly into organic search insights.

Pricing: Free to use, but comes coupled with Google Ads.

10. Tableau: Best for Data Visualization

(Image Source: Tableau)

When it comes to data visualization, Tableau Software is in a league of its own. It transforms complex data sets into intuitive, interactive visualizations. I use Tableau to create dashboards that provide clear, actionable insights at a glance.

Its ability to connect to various data sources and perform advanced analytics makes it a powerful tool for both reporting and strategic planning. The visual appeal and clarity Tableau brings to data help me communicate insights effectively across teams.

• Supports integration with a wide array of data sources, including big data and cloud databases.
• Features drag-and-drop functionality for creating interactive dashboards.
• Allows for real-time data updates, enabling dynamic and up-to-date visualizations.
• Provides robust security features for managing access and data integrity.
• Supports mobile access, allowing users to view and interact with dashboards on the go.
• Has a steep learning curve to utilize its advanced features fully.
• Requires significant system resources for optimal performance.

Pricing: Starts at $12 per user per month.

11. Typeform: Best for Lead Qualification Surveys

(Image Source: Zendesk)

Typeform is my preferred tool for lead qualification surveys. Its engaging, conversational format makes it easy to collect detailed information from prospects. I love how customizable and user-friendly Typeform is, allowing me to create surveys that are not only effective but also enjoyable for respondents.

The data I gather through Typeform helps me qualify leads more accurately, ensuring my sales efforts are focused on the most promising opportunities

• Provides a wide range of customization options to match brand identity. Supports logic jumps that tailor questions based on previous answers.
• Integrates with major marketing and CRM platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and MailChimp to enhance marketing functionality.
• It delivers robust data collection and analysis tools so that you can analyze the collected information.
• Offers templates for quick setup of surveys, quizzes, and forms.
• Limited options for more complex survey requirements or data processing.
• Users may experience limitations in exporting data in certain formats.

Pricing: Start at $25 per month. Billed annually.

12. Qualtrics: Best for Enterprise-Level Surveys With Advanced Features

(Image Source: Appvizer)

For enterprise-level surveys, Qualtrics is unmatched. It offers advanced features like custom survey flows, extensive question types, and powerful analytics.

I used Qualtrics for large-scale research projects, where the ability to segment data and perform complex analyses is crucial. Its robust platform supports everything from customer satisfaction surveys to employee feedback, making it a versatile tool for any organization.

• Features powerful data analysis tools, including predictive intelligence and trend insights.
• Supports advanced user management and collaboration features.
• Provides extensive security and compliance measures that are suitable for large enterprises.
• Allows for in-depth customization of surveys to fit exact research needs.
• Offers automated actions based on survey responses to enhance respondent engagement.
• Some features require advanced knowledge of research methodologies.
• Customization and setup can be time-consuming for complex surveys.

13. Userlytics : Best for User Experience Testing

Userlytics is essential for user experience testing. It allows you to conduct remote usability tests with real users, providing valuable insights into how they interact with my website or app.

The video recordings and detailed metrics help you identify pain points and optimize the user journey. Userlytics’ flexibility and depth of insights make it a critical component of my UX research toolkit.

• Offers features for testing websites, apps, and prototypes for a better view of user experience.
• Supports a variety of testing methods, including card sorting and tree testing.
• Includes built-in analytics for assessing user interaction and satisfaction.
• Allows for the recording of user sessions for in-depth analysis.
• Provides actionable insights to improve user experience and interface design.
• More focused on user experience testing, less on broader market research.
• The platform can be complex to navigate for those new to usability testing.

Pricing: Starts at $34 per month. Billed annually.

14 .Upwave (Formerly Survata): Best for Brand Lift Studies

(Image Source: Upwave)

Upwave is my go-to for brand lift studies. It measures the impact of advertising campaigns on brand perception, providing clear insights into their effectiveness. I rely on Upwave to assess how well my campaigns are resonating with the target audience and to fine-tune my strategies for better results. The detailed reports and actionable data it provides are invaluable for demonstrating ROI and optimizing future campaigns.

• It features real-time campaign analytics for quick decision-making.
• Supports extensive survey targeting options to reach the right audience.
• Provides a straightforward interface for setting up and managing surveys.
• Delivers insights into consumer sentiment and brand perception.
• Uses a proprietary network for data collection to ensure quality responses.
• Limited in terms of custom survey design compared to more focused survey platforms.
• Data reporting can be too simplistic for very detailed analytical needs.

Pricing: Starts at $2/participant.

15. Make My Persona: Best for Creating Detailed Buyer Personas

(Image Source: Optinmonster)

Creating detailed buyer personas is a breeze with Make My Persona. I used this quite a lot in the past, and it helped me understand what potential customers are searching for and their common questions and concerns.

By visualizing search data, the tool enables you to craft comprehensive personas that accurately reflect your target audience’s needs and preferences. These insights are crucial for tailoring your marketing strategies and ensuring my messaging resonates with the right people.

• Provides step-by-step guidance through the persona-building process.
• Includes templates to start and refine personas quickly.
• Helps you understand your target audience better with detailed insights.
• Supports the creation of multiple personas for different market segments.
• Delivers a user-friendly interface that’s accessible to all team members.
• Features can be too basic for more advanced marketing teams.
• Limited customization options for the templates provided.

Pricing: Free to use with limited market research features.

Evaluation Criteria

The evaluation of products or tools chosen for this article follows an unbiased, systematic approach that ensures a fair, insightful, and well-rounded review. This method employs six key factors:

• User Reviews / Ratings: Direct experiences from users, including ratings and feedback from reputable sites, provide a ground-level perspective. This feedback is critical in understanding overall satisfaction and potential problems.
• Essential Features & Functionality: The value of a product is ascertained by its core features and overall functionality. Through an in-depth exploration of these aspects, the practical usefulness and effectiveness of the tools are carefully evaluated.
• Ease of Use: The user-friendliness of a product or service is assessed, focusing on the design, interface, and navigation. This ensures a positive experience for users of all levels of expertise.
• Customer Support: The quality of customer support is examined, taking into account its efficiency and how well it supports users in different phases – setting up, addressing concerns, and resolving operational issues.
• Value for Money: Value for money is evaluated by comparing the quality, performance, and features. The goal is to help the reader understand whether they would be getting their money’s worth.
• Personal Experience / Experts’ Opinions: This part of the evaluation criteria draws insightful observations from the personal experience of the writer and the opinions of industry experts.

What Is Market Research?

What is Customer Feedback & How to Use User Research Software Market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market, including data on target customers , competitors, and industry trends. It helps businesses understand consumer needs and preferences, guiding product developmen t and marketing strategies.

For example, a company planning to launch a new fitness app might conduct surveys and focus groups to determine the features potential users value most.

Read: Survey Teardowns: How Gold’s Gym Gathers User Feedback Via Email | Blog

According to a LinkedIn report , a lot of companies use market research to gain a competitive advantage, highlighting its importance in strategic decision-making and business growth.

What Are the Market Research Tools Used For?

Market research tools are essential for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data related to market conditions, customer behavior, and competitive landscapes. They serve various purposes, including:

1. Understanding Customer Needs and Preferences

These tools help businesses collect data on customer preferences , buying habits, and satisfaction levels. This information is crucial for developing products and services that meet customer expectations. Nudge.png

2. Identifying Market Trends

Market research survey platforms can track and analyze trends within an industry, helping companies stay ahead of the competition by adapting to changes in market conditions.

3. Competitor Analysis

Businesses use these tools to monitor competitor activities , strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. This helps in benchmarking and developing strategies to gain a competitive edge.

4. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

Tools for market research can assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by tracking metrics such as customer engagement, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).

5. Segmenting Markets

Market research tools assist in dividing the market into distinct segments based on demographics, psychographics, and behavior. This allows for more targeted marketing and product development efforts.

6. Forecasting Sales and Market Potential

These tools provide data and analytical capabilities to forecast future sales, helping businesses in planning and budgeting.

7. Product Development and Innovation

By understanding customer needs and market gaps, businesses can use market research tools to guide product development and innovation, ensuring that new products meet market demand.

8. Identifying Opportunities and Threats

SWOT analysis tools help businesses identify internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats, enabling better strategic planning. Using these tools effectively allows businesses to make informed decisions, tailor their marketing strategies, and ultimately achieve better outcomes in their respective markets.

Who Uses Market Research Tools?

Market research tools are used by a wide range of professionals and organizations to gather and analyze data about markets, customers, and competitors.

Here are some of the key users:

1. Marketing Professionals: They use market research tools to understand market trends, customer preferences, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. By analyzing data, they can tailor their strategies to reach better and engage their target audience, ultimately driving more successful marketing efforts.

2. Business Owners and Entrepreneurs: These individuals leverage market research tools to identify new market opportunities, assess competition, and make informed decisions about product development and business strategies. This helps them stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions.

3.Product Managers: Product managers use these tools to gather customer needs and preferences insights. This information is crucial in guiding the development and improvement of products, ensuring they meet market demands and customer expectations

4. Sales Teams: Sales professionals utilize market research to identify potential customers and understand their needs. This knowledge allows them to tailor their sales strategies, improve customer targeting, and increase their chances of closing deals.

5.Consultants and Market Analysts : These experts use market research tools to provide data-driven insights and recommendations to their clients. They analyze market trends, consumer behavior, and competitive landscapes to help businesses make informed decisions.

6. Researchers and Academics: In the academic and research fields, professionals use market research tools to conduct studies and publish findings on various market dynamics and consumer behavior. These market research surveys contribute to a broader understanding of market trends and influence industry practices.

7. Customer Experience Managers: These managers rely on market research to understand customer feedback and improve overall customer satisfaction . By analyzing data on customer interactions and experiences, they can implement changes that enhance the customer journey.

8. Investors and Financial Analysts: Investors and analysts use market research tools to assess the viability of investments and understand market conditions. This information helps them make informed decisions about where to allocate resources and identify potential risks and opportunities.

9. Human Resources Professionals: HR professionals use market research to gauge employee satisfaction and organizational culture. Internal surveys and research help them identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to enhance the workplace environment.

10. Nonprofit Organizations: Nonprofits use market research tools to understand the needs of their target beneficiaries and the impact of their programs. This information is essential for designing effective interventions and demonstrating their value to stakeholders and donors.

Each of these users leverages market research tools to gather both quantitative and qualitative data, enabling them to make more informed and strategic decisions in their respective fields.

Read More: 6 Inventive Uses For Qualaroo | Blog

What Are the Major Features of Market Research Tools?

Market research tools offer a wide array of features to help businesses gather, analyze, and interpret data to make informed decisions. Here are some of the major features found in these tools:

• Survey Creation and Distribution:
• Customizable Templates: Pre-built templates for various types of surveys.
• Question Types: Multiple choice, open-ended, Likert scale, and more.
• Logic Branching: Direct respondents to different questions based on their previous answers.
• Multi-Channel Distribution: Send surveys via email, social media, or embed them on websites.

2. Data Collection and Management:

• Real-Time Data Collection: Immediate data capture as respondents complete surveys.
• Database Integration: Import and export data from other systems and databases.
• Data Anonymization: Ensure respondent anonymity for sensitive surveys.

3. Analytics and Reporting:

• Data Visualization: Graphs, charts, and dashboards for easy data interpretation.
• Cross-Tabulation: Compare different variables to find correlations and trends.
• Text Analysis: Analyze open-ended responses for sentiment and keyword trends.
• Statistical Analysis: Advanced statistical tools for deeper data insights.

4. Panel Management:

• Panel Recruitment: Tools for recruiting and managing survey participants.
• Demographic Filtering: Target specific demographics for more relevant insights.
• Incentive Management: Manage rewards for survey participation.

5. Market Segmentation:

• Cluster Analysis: Group respondents based on similarities in their responses.
• Persona Development: Create detailed profiles of different customer segments.

6. Competitive Analysis:

Benchmarking: Compare your data with industry standards or competitors. SWOT Analysis: Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

7. Trend Analysis:

• Historical Data Comparison: Analyze how responses change over time.
• Predictive Analytics: Use historical data to forecast future trends.

8. Collaboration and Sharing:

• Team Collaboration: Share surveys and results with team members.
• Role-Based Access: Control who can view and edit surveys and data.

9. Mobile Accessibility:

• Responsive Design: Surveys and dashboards accessible on mobile devices.
• Mobile App Integration: Dedicated apps for data collection and analysis on the go.

10. Integration Capabilities:

• API Access: Connect with other software tools and platforms.
• Third-Party Integrations: Integration with CRM, email marketing, and other tools.
• These features enable businesses to conduct thorough market research, gain valuable insights, and make data-driven decisions effectively.

What Are the Benefits of Market Research Tools?

Some of the major benefits of market research tools are as follows:

• Improved Marketing Strategies: By providing a deep understanding of the market and target audience, market research tools help businesses to create more effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their audience.
• Product Development: Insights from market research tools can guide the development of new products or the improvement of existing ones. This ensures that products meet the needs and preferences of the target market.
• Customer Satisfaction: Regular use of market research tools helps businesses stay in tune with their customers’ changing needs and preferences, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Cost Efficiency: By identifying the most promising markets and customer segments, market research tools help businesses allocate their resources more efficiently, reducing waste and increasing ROI.
• Risk Mitigation: Understanding market dynamics and customer sentiments helps businesses anticipate potential challenges and risks, allowing them to develop strategies to mitigate these risks.

• Competitive Advantage: Businesses that effectively utilize market research tools are better positioned to understand their market environment, adapt to changes, and stay ahead of the competition.
• Strategic Planning: Market research tools provide the data needed for long-term strategic planning. This ensures that business strategies are aligned with market realities and future trends.

Thus, market research tools are essential for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive environment. They provide the insights needed to understand the market, make informed decisions, and develop strategies that lead to business growth and success.

How to Choose the Right Market Research Tool

Picking the right market research tool is crucial for gathering insightful data that can drive strategic decisions. Here’s a guide to help you select the best market research tool for your needs:

• Identify Your Research Objectives
• Purpose: Determine whether you need qualitative insights , quantitative data, or both.
• Scope: Understand the scale of your research – is it for a small internal project or a large-scale study?

Pro Tip: Clearly define your research objectives at the outset to narrow down tools that specialize in your specific needs, ensuring a more tailored approach.

Also Read: Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research: How to Get the Best of Both Worlds

2. Assess Features and Capabilities

• Data Collection Methods: Look for tools that offer various methods like surveys, focus groups, interviews, and social media analysis.
• Customization: Ensure the tool allows you to customize surveys and questionnaires to suit your specific needs.
• Reporting and Analytics: Check for robust analytics and reporting features that can help you interpret data effectively.
• Integration: Consider if the tool integrates well with other software you use, such as CRM or data visualization tools.

Pro Tip: Prioritize tools with advanced analytics and integration capabilities to maximize the utility of your collected data.

3. Insist on Ease of Use

• User Interface: The tool should have an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
• Learning Curve: Evaluate how easy it is for your team to learn and use the tool efficiently.

Pro Tip: Opt for tools with free training resources and a supportive community to accelerate your team’s proficiency.

4. Ensure Data Security and Compliance

• Privacy: Ensure the tool complies with data protection regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.
• Security: Look for features like data encryption and secure storage to protect sensitive information.

Pro Tip: Always verify the tool’s compliance with the latest regulations to avoid legal complications and ensure data integrity.

5. Consider Cost and ROI

• Budget: Compare the pricing plans of different tools and see what fits your budget.
• Value for Money: Assess whether the features offered justify the cost. Sometimes, a higher-priced tool may offer better ROI in terms of functionality and insights.

Pro Tip: Consider the long-term benefits and potential cost savings of investing in a higher-priced tool that offers comprehensive features.

6. Check Customer Support and Resources

• Support: Check the availability and quality of customer support. This includes live chat, email, phone support, and help centers.
• Training and Resources: Look for tools that provide comprehensive training materials, webinars, and documentation.

Pro Tip: Select tools with responsive customer support to ensure quick resolution of any issues and uninterrupted research activities.

7. Read Reviews and Testimonials

• User Reviews: Read reviews from other users to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tool.
• Case Studies: Look for case studies to see how the tool has been used effectively by other businesses.
• Pro Tip: Pay attention to detailed reviews that highlight specific use cases similar to your needs to gauge the tool’s real-world performance.

8. Go for Trial and Evaluation

Free Trial: Take advantage of free trials or demo versions to test the tool before making a purchase. Pilot Testing: Conduct a pilot study to see if the tool meets your requirements and integrates well with your workflow.

Pro Tip: Use the trial period to thoroughly test all features and involve your team in the evaluation to get diverse feedback.

10. Check Scalability

• Ensure the tool can scale with your business needs and handle an increasing volume of data and complexity of research over time.

Pro Tip: Choose a scalable tool to avoid the hassle of switching platforms as your research grows, ensuring consistency and long-term cost efficiency.

By carefully evaluating these factors, you can select a market research tool that aligns with your objectives, budget, and technical requirements, ensuring you gather actionable insights for your business.

Also Read: What Is Customer Feedback Software and How t o Choose the Best One | Blog

What are the Budget Considerations When Picking a Market Research Tool?

Budget considerations are crucial when selecting a market research tool to ensure you get the best value for your investment. Start by assessing the initial costs, including software purchase or subscription fees and licensing. Subscription models might offer flexibility but often entail recurring charges. Besides, factor in ongoing costs such as maintenance, support, and training, which can add up over time.

Consider additional features and upgrades that might incur extra costs. Some tools offer basic functionality at a lower price but charge more for advanced features and integrations.

Finally, ensure value for money by comparing features within your budget range and reviewing user feedback. Carefully scrutinize contract terms for any hidden costs, leveraging free trials or demos when available.

Case Studies

1. the lenovo story.

Read the Full Story

2. The Hootsuite Story

Unlock the Power of Market Research Tools for Strategic Growth

Market research tools are essential for any business looking to achieve strategic growth. They provide valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and competitive analysis. By leveraging these tools, companies can make data-driven decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and stay ahead of the competition.

After using several tools for marketing research and surveys, I found Qualaroo really good in this aspect. With its advanced targeting , customizable surveys, and actionable analytics, it helps businesses gather deep insights efficiently, making it a top choice for enhancing strategic decision-making and fostering growth.

About the author

Dwayne Charrington

Dwayne Charrington is an expert writer in customer feedback management, UX design, and user research. He helps businesses understand user intent and enhance the customer experience. Dwayne covers feedback management, lead generation, survey accessibility, and the impact of AI and VR on user interaction. He shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry.

What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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The 13 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

Jul 26, 2024

10 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 and secondary research (aka desk research or complementary 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.

Tip: Also take a look at the top secondary research companies out there.

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:

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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

Secondary Research Guide: Definition, Methods, Examples

What Is Desk Research? Meaning, Methodology, Examples

Top Secondary Market Research Companies | Desk Research Companies

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Top 10 Free Market Research Tools to Get Valuable Insights

Understanding your market is crucial for success. However, the market research process can be expensive, impacting small businesses and entrepreneurs. Thankfully, there’s good news – you don’t need a big budget to gather valuable insights about your customers and industry trends. Businesses of all sizes can now use free market research tools to make informed decisions and remain ahead of the competition.

From survey platforms to trend analysis tools, these resources offer a wealth of information at no cost. So, these tools can be your secret weapon for success, whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your existing business.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the top 10 free market research tools that can help you supercharge your business growth.

What are Free Market Research Tools?

Free market research tools are helpful resources that anyone can use without spending money to learn about markets, customers, and competitors. These tools give insights that can be used to make smart business decisions.

Some of these tools let you ask people questions through surveys or check what topics are popular online. Others show you how many people are visiting your website or your competitors’ sites. There are even tools that help you see what people are saying about your business on social media.

These tools are great because they’re usually available online and don’t cost anything to use. They give businesses important insights without needing to spend a lot of money on fancy research. By using these tools smartly, businesses can make better decisions and sell more successfully.

Benefits of having Free Market Research Tools

These tools provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, industry trends, and competitor strategies without breaking the bank. Here, we’ll explore the benefits of leveraging free market research software and how they can help businesses thrive.

• It Save Your Money: With free market research tools, you can unlock valuable insights without spending a single penny. That means even if you’re running on a tight budget, you can still gather important market research data to fuel your business decisions.
• Making Smarter Moves: Forget relying on guesswork. Free market research tools arm you with real data so you can make informed decisions. Say goodbye to blind leaps and hello to calculated steps toward success.
• Staying One Step Ahead: Keeping an eye on your competitors is key to staying ahead of the game. Free market research tools let you peek into what your competitors are up to, helping you fine-tune your marketing strategies and stand out from the crowd.
• Understanding Customer’s Language : Have you ever wished you could read your customers’ minds? Market research tools won’t give you psychic powers, but they’ll come pretty close. By understanding your customers’ preferences and behaviors, you can tailor your products and messages to speak directly to their hearts.
• Building Better Products : Who doesn’t love a product that’s a perfect fit? With market research tools, you can gather feedback from your target audience and tweak your products until they’re just right. It’s like having a focus group at your fingertips without the hefty price tag.
• Putting Smiles on Your Customers Faces: Happy customers are the lifeblood of any business. Market research tools help you understand what makes your customers tick, so you can delight them with products and experiences that leave them coming back for more.

10 Free Market Research Tools You Should Know

From survey platforms to analytics tools, these tools offer valuable insights into consumer behavior , industry trends, and competitive analysis . Here, we’ll explore 10 free and best market research tools that every business owner should know about.

1. QuestionPro

QuestionPro offers a wide range of free survey features, including customizable question types, Google Sheets integration, and robust analytics. With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features, QuestionPro is a great choice for conducting market research and surveys to gather insights from its target audience.

How it Works: Users can create customized market research surveys using a wide range of question types and templates. A market research survey can be distributed through email, social media, websites, or embedded into mobile apps. The platform provides robust analytics and reporting features to analyze survey responses in real-time.

Features You Can Avail:

• Create unlimited surveys with up to 200 responses per survey.
• Access to basic survey templates and question types.
• Branching skip logic based on responses to a question.
• Trend analysis and geocoding survey responses.
• Basic reporting and analytics features
• Data visualization .
• Easy-to-use interface for creating surveys.
• Up to 30 different question types.
• Integration with popular third-party tools like Salesforce and Google Sheets.
• Customizable branding options for surveys.
• Responsive customer support team.
• Email support may have slower response times compared to premium plans.

2. Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to explore the popularity of search queries over time and across different regions. By analyzing search trends, you can identify emerging topics, monitor consumer interest in your industry, and track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

How it Works: Users can enter keywords or topics into the search bar to view trends in search volume over time. The tool provides data on regional interest, related queries, and trending topics. Users can also compare the popularity of multiple search terms or topics.

• Access to search trends data for free.
• Explore historical search trends and regional interest.
• View related queries and trending topics.
• User-friendly interface for exploring trends.
• Ability to compare multiple search terms or topics.
• Useful for identifying trending topics and keywords.
• Integration with Google Analytics for deeper analysis.
• Limited to search data from Google’s search engine.
• Data may not always be representative of overall market trends.

3. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey offers a free plan that allows you to create surveys, collect responses, and analyze data. With its intuitive survey builder and customizable templates, SurveyMonkey makes it easy to gather feedback from customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

How it Works: Users can create surveys using customizable templates and a variety of question types. Surveys can be distributed through email, social media, websites, or embedded into mobile apps. The platform offers advanced analytics and reporting features to gain insights from survey responses.

• Create unlimited surveys with up to 10 questions per survey.
• Basic survey templates and question types.
• Collect up to 100 responses per survey.
• Basic reporting and analytics features.
• Email support.
• A wide range of question types and templates are available.
• Multiple distribution options, including email and social media.
• Real-time analytics for quick insights.
• A limited number of responses and questions in the free plan.
• Advanced features like skip logic and A/B testing are available only in paid plans.

4. Statista

Statista provides access to a vast database of statistics and market research reports across various industries. While some premium content requires a subscription, Statista offers a significant amount of free data that can help you understand market trends, consumer behavior, and industry benchmarks.

How it Works: Users can search for statistics and reports on specific industries, countries, or topics of interest. The platform provides access to data from thousands of sources, including government agencies, industry associations, and market research firms.

• Access to limited statistics and infographics is free.
• Basic search and browsing capabilities.
• Limited access to reports and studies.
• Access to data from reputable sources.
• Customizable charts and infographics for presentations.
• Ability to download data in multiple formats.
• Limited access to data and reports in the free plan.
• Some statistics may require a premium subscription for access.
• Full access to reports and advanced features is available only in paid plans.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool that allows you to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics. By analyzing website data, you can gain insights into your audience demographics, engagement metrics, and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

How it Works: Users can install a tracking code on their website to collect data about visitor interactions, page views, conversion rates, and more. The platform offers customizable reports and dashboards to analyze website performance and audience demographics.

• Access to basic web analytics features is free.
• Track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics.
• Customizable reports and dashboards.
• Integration with other Google products like Google Ads and Search Console.
• Comprehensive insights into website performance and user behavior.
• Customizable reports and dashboards for analyzing data.
• Real-time data tracking for up-to-date insights.
• Audience segmentation for targeting specific user groups.
• Limited support for tracking offline interactions.
• Requires technical setup and implementation of tracking code.

6. Google Alerts

Google Alerts notifies you when new content related to specific keywords or topics is published online. By monitoring mentions of your brand, industry trends, and competitor activity, you can stay informed and identify opportunities to engage with your audience.

How it Works: Users can create alerts for keywords, phrases, or topics of interest. Google Alerts will then send email notifications whenever new content matching the alert criteria is published on the web.

• Create unlimited alerts for free.
• Monitor keywords, topics, or phrases.
• Receive email notifications for new content.
• Adjust frequency and sources for alerts.
• Free and easy-to-use monitoring tool.
• Set up alerts for specific keywords or topics.
• Receive email notifications for new mentions or content.
• Monitor brand mentions, industry trends, or competitor activity.
• Adjust alert settings for frequency and sources.
• Limited to monitoring online content indexed by Google.
• May receive irrelevant or duplicate alerts.
• No advanced filtering options for alerts.
• Email notifications may not always be timely.

7. Qualtrics

Qualtrics offers a free plan that allows you to create surveys, collect feedback, and analyze data in real-time. With its advanced features and customizable reporting options, Qualtrics is a valuable tool for businesses looking to gain insights into customer satisfaction, product usability, and market trends.

How it Works: Users can create surveys using a drag-and-drop editor or choose from pre-built templates. Surveys can be distributed through email, social media, websites, or embedded into mobile apps. The platform offers advanced analytics and reporting features to gain insights from survey responses.

• Access to basic survey creation and distribution features is free.
• Create unlimited surveys with up to 100 responses per survey.
• Drag-and-drop editor and pre-built templates for quick survey creation.
• Integration with popular third-party tools like Salesforce and Slack.
• Limited number of responses in the free plan.
• Advanced features like skip logic and branching are available only in paid plans.

8. Pew Research Center

The Pew Research Center conducts public opinion polling and demographic research on a wide range of topics. By accessing free reports and datasets, you can gain valuable insights into social and political trends, consumer attitudes, and demographic shifts.

How it Works: The Pew Research Center publishes reports and studies based on surveys conducted among the general public, specific demographics, or expert panels. These reports provide insights into public opinion, attitudes, and trends on various issues.

• Access to reports, studies, and datasets for free.
• Explore research topics by category or keyword.
• Download reports and datasets in various formats.
• Email subscription for updates and notifications.
• A trusted source of data and analysis on social and political issues.
• A wide range of research topics and reports are available.
• Access to raw data and datasets for further analysis.
• Regularly updated with new research findings.
• Suitable for academic research and policy analysis.
• Some reports and datasets may be restricted to paid subscribers.
• Limited to research topics covered by the Pew Research Center.
• Reports may have a lag time between data collection and publication.
• Limited customization options for data analysis .

9. Make My persona

Make My Persona is a free tool by HubSpot that helps you create detailed buyer personas based on customer demographics, behaviors, and goals. By understanding your target audience better, you can tailor your marketing messages and product offerings to meet their needs effectively.

How it Works: Users answer a series of questions about their ideal customers’ demographics, behaviors, goals, and challenges. Based on the responses, Make My Persona generates a customized buyer persona template that can be used for marketing and sales strategies.

• Create one buyer persona for free.
• Answer questions to define your ideal customer profile.
• Generate a customized buyer persona template.
• Download the persona template in PDF format.
• Easy-to-use tool for creating buyer personas.
• A guided questionnaire helps define the ideal customer profile.
• Customized persona template includes key details and insights.
• Suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries.
• Integration with other HubSpot tools for seamless workflow.
• Free and accessible for businesses with limited budgets.
• Limited to creating one persona for free.
• Basic customization options for persona templates.

10. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is a user feedback tool that helps businesses collect insights from website visitors through targeted surveys and feedback forms. With its customizable survey options and real-time feedback collection, Qualaroo enables you to gather actionable insights and improve the user experience on your website.

How it Works: Users can create customizable surveys and feedback forms that target specific segments of website visitors based on behavior, demographics, or other criteria. Qualaroo offers advanced analytics and reporting features to analyze feedback and identify actionable insights.

• Integration with popular analytics and CRM platforms.
• Collaboration features for team-based research projects.
• Integration with third-party tools may require additional fees.

Why Choose QuestionPro as The Best Free Market Research Tool?

Understanding your market is crucial for business success in today’s competitive landscape. This is where market research tools like QuestionPro come into play. Here’s why you should choose QuestionPro as your go-to free market research tool:

• Comprehensive Features: QuestionPro offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to meet all your market research needs. From survey creation to data analysis, you’ll find everything you need to gather insights and make informed decisions.
• Free Forever: Unlike many other market research tools that offer limited free trials, QuestionPro is free forever. You can access essential features without any time restrictions, allowing you to conduct market research without worrying about costs.
• Wide Range of Question Types: With over 50 question types available, QuestionPro allows you to design surveys that meet your specific requirements. Whether you need multiple-choice questions , rating scales , or open-ended responses, you’ll find the right tools at your disposal.
• Google Sheets Integration: QuestionPro is the only survey platform that offers free seamless integration with Google Sheets. This feature allows you to easily export and analyze survey data using familiar tools, streamlining your research process.
• Multiple Distribution Channels: Reach your target audience wherever they are with QuestionPro’s multiple distribution channels. Whether you prefer email surveys, social media polls, or website embeds, you can engage with your audience effectively.
• Customization Options: Use QuestionPro’s customization options to personalize your surveys to align with your brand identity . From branding elements to question formatting, you have the flexibility to create surveys that resonate with your audience.
• Seamless Collaboration: Collaborate with your team members seamlessly on research projects using QuestionPro’s collaboration features. Share surveys, analyze data together, and brainstorm strategies in real-time, enhancing productivity and efficiency.

These free market research tools provide valuable resources for businesses looking to understand their target audience, monitor industry trends, and make data-driven decisions. By leveraging these tools effectively, you can gain consumer insights that will help you boost your business and stay ahead of the competition in today’s dynamic market environment.

QuestionPro offers a powerful and user-friendly platform for conducting free market research. With its comprehensive features, intuitive interface, and dedicated support, QuestionPro is the right choice for businesses looking to gain valuable insights and stay ahead of the competition.

So why wait? Start using QuestionPro as your market research tool today and take your business to new heights with QuestionPro!

LEARN MORE         FREE TRIAL

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

These tools typically offer access to demographic data, consumer behavior trends, industry reports, competitor analysis, and market segmentation information.

While free tools provide valuable insights, they may not offer the depth or customization of paid services. Businesses often use a combination of both for comprehensive analysis.

These tools provide cost-effective ways for businesses to access valuable market data, understand customer preferences, track competitors, and make informed strategic decisions.

While free market research tools may not offer the depth of premium tools, many free tools provide credible data sourced from reputable databases and research sources.

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The 10 Best Market Research Tools for Startups to Use in 2024

Table of contents.

Over the last 10 years, the collective market worth of startups has grown by 239%! How can you join the elite club of unicorns and get your slice of this pie? In business, success is a combination of great ideas, talented people, wise decision-making, strategic execution, and a bit of luck. By leveraging market research tools for startups, you increase your chances of turning your vision into reality. Successfully!

Market research tools for startups can significantly speed up gathering and analyzing essential market data. They provide valuable market insights, including customer behavior, target audiences, industry-specific trends, competitor strategies, and more, helping startups successfully navigate the competitive landscape.

Startups are not corporations.

Because of their innovative and agile nature, they need quick and actionable insights that can be accessed with a few clicks rather than a comprehensive understanding that requires extensive time and analysis.

Therefore, startups conducting market research must focus on efficiency and simplicity. Such organizations require tools that are flexible, fast, and easy to use.

And that’s why you’re here, right?

If so, I have good news – you couldn’t find a better article!

Without further ado, let’s dive into the list of top market research software for startups!

Top Market Research Tools for Startups

01 brand24 – best for real-time social media monitoring and tracking brand mentions.

Free 14-day trial.

I will start our list with my favorite market research tool for startups – Brand24.

This AI-powered media monitoring software allows you to track and analyze brand & industry mentions across multiple online sources, including:

• All the major social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitch, and Telegram;
• Non-social sources – news sites, blogs, video platforms, podcasts, newsletters, and review sites.

One of Brand24’s core traits is its AI-backed sentiment analysis , which automatically discovers and categorizes people’s emotions regarding your brand, industry trends, hashtags, and any other keyword you define.

Try the best market research tool for startups!

Okay, and how can Brand24 streamline your process of conducting market research?

The tool allows you to create and track multiple projects , allowing you to analyze your own and your competitors’ performance.

To avoid theoretical blah-blah-blah, I decided to show it to you in a real-life example.

I created a project for Garmin – my favorite brand that produces and sells sports smartwatches.

The first step I should take is to find the brand’s top competitors. And the fastest way to do this is to ask the AI Brand Assistant. It’s a chatbot that works like ChatGPT but much better. Why?

Because Brand Assistant has something other chatboxes don’t – access to all the internal data collected for your project!

This one but significant thing allows you to receive personalized insights no other tool would provide and perform detailed brand research .

So, after asking Brand Assistant about Garmin’s top competitors, it replied that the most significant are Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit.

Of course, a Brand Assistant can answer much more detailed and deeper questions.

Here are some sample prompts you can ask the Brand Assistant to perform market research for startups:

• What are the current trends in my industry?
• What is the demographic of the target market for my product/service?
• What are the purchasing behaviors of the target market for my product/service?
• How does my competitor position their brand in the market?
• What are the common pricing strategies in my business niche?
• What are the most effective marketing strategies and channels for reaching the target market?

Next, when we know our competitors, it’s time to gather and analyze more detailed information.

The Compare Projects feature allows you to juxtapose two or more brands. This enables you to do a thorough competitor analysis and see your brand performance relative to your niche rivals.

Look at the table below.

As you can see, Garmin and Apple Watch go head-to-head. While Garmin generally receives more total mentions, Apple Watch has the advantage in terms of reach.

The conclusion? Garmin should focus more on social media posts to increase brand visibility .

I could write much more about Brand24’s awesome market research features, but it’s time to move on!

Key features:

• AI Brand Assistant
• Sentiment Analysis
• AI Topic Analysis
• Compare Projects
• Compare Periods
• Presence Score
• Social media monitoring
• Non-social sources monitoring
• Share of Voice
• Personalized reports

Make comprehensive market research!

0 2 Semrush – for competitive analysis and SEO insights

At its core, Semrush is a digital marketing tool primarily focused on SEO insights and analytics.

However, Semrush has evolved into a multipurpose platform that goes far beyond search engine optimization.

If you want to use it to conduct thorough market research, the tool offers a variety of features and functions. The most important one is Market Explorer.

Using traffic measures, this Semrush feature allows you to analyze the total size of your market, list key players in that field, calculate your market share, and map the competitive landscape in your niche.

Additionally, you can compare your domain audience demography with the average market audience.

As stated above, Semrush is mainly an SEO tool, and its capabilities, in that matter, are really helpful to conduct market research.

Traffic Analytics provides in-depth website traffic insights. It lets you track your competitors’ traffic, understand visit behavior, and identify traffic sources.

You can use the data to learn from competitor strategies and improve yours.

• Market Explorer
• Traffic Analytics
• Target Audience Analytics
• Market Geo Distribution
• Socialeconomics of a target market

Try Brand24 – the best market research tool for startups!

03 Google Trends – for tracking and analyzing search trends

Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to track the popularity of search terms over time.

How could it help you in your market research?

By analyzing search volume, you can discover the demand for your products or services in different parts of the world or during specific periods (i.e., seasonal spikes in popularity).

Such data-driven insights can help you plan logistics, adjust your marketing strategies, or update your products (e.g., adding a new language version).

Moreover, Google Trends allows you to perform competitor research very quickly.

Just insert your competitor’s name in the “+Add comparison” box, check the interest over time, compare the breakdown by region, and more.

Besides, you can check which keywords generated the most interest among your or your competitors’ customers in a given period.

You can also use Google Trends to predict market trends and manage your content strategy.

As for free market research for startup software, it offers a lot!

• Search term popularity over time
• Comparison of search terms
• Geographic interest by region
• Related topics and queries
• Real-time data about trends and queries
• Historical data collection

Try the best market research tool!

04 Similarweb – for website traffic and consumer insights

Similarweb is another helpful tool for collecting market research data.

It provides insights into website and app traffic, helping evaluate market size and discover detailed insights about people’s behavior on your competitors’ sites.

With Similarweb, you can analyze your industry, see how traffic changes among competitors, and use a special matrix to determine the top players in your niche.

The tool also lets you check what your customers and your competitors’ customers like, how they move through the sales process, and how loyal they are to different brands.

For website traffic, Similarweb helps you measure key engagement metrics like how long people stay on a site, how many pages they visit, and how often they leave quickly. This helps you understand how well a site keeps visitors’ attention.

I also like that you can focus only on the important parts of a website by filtering out the rest.

Any downsides? Some users say that the data Similarweb collects can sometimes be inaccurate.

• Keyword trends
• Traffic and engagement metrics
• Advanced audience insights
• Industry trends
• Mobile app analytics

05 BuzzSumo – for content performance and industry trends

Startups must be present online – that’s pretty obvious. But how can they cut through the noise and make people notice them?

BuzzSumo is a great tool for that purpose! It’s a content research software that helps you find out what’s popular right now and which topics are getting the most attention.

With BuzzSumo, you can discover what kind of content your target audience is engaging with, see what your competitors are sharing, and identify key influencers in your industry to build a competitive advantage.

And it’s not only about text content. The tool’s Content Discovery & Content Research features allow you to explore popular videos, infographics, and other trending media types.

As BuzzSumo is also public relations software , you can use it to discover niche-relevant journalists and establish ties with them. However, this feature is extra-paid and requires purchasing a higher subscription plan.

• Content Research
• Content Discovery
• Content competitive analysis
• Trending topics discovery
• Basic media mentions monitoring

06 Statista – for industry statistics and market data

I bet you have been on the Statista website at least once in your life.

It’s an online platform that provides access to a huge collection of statistics, data, and reports covering nearly endless topics and industries.

Statista aggregates data from over 22,000 sources and presents it in easy-to-understand charts, graphs, and infographics.

This makes it an essential source of information not only for startups but also for huge companies, researchers, educators, and individuals in need of reliable information for market analysis, forecasting & identifying trends, and decision-making.

So, if you need deeper insights into your industry, consumer behavior, or global market trends, Statista is the tool that can provide you with the data you need – with one important caveat.

The tool is based on secondary data. Therefore, it’s always better to double-check the information that is essential for your business decisions. Trust, but verify.

• Extensive database of stats, data, reports, graphs, and infographics
• Detailed market reports
• Interactive data visualization
• Industry & company insights
• API integration

07 Answer the Public – for visualizing customer queries and interests

Answer the Public is a handy SEO tool for anyone wanting to uncover what their potential customers are asking about online.

The tool visualizes search queries, helping you see exactly what people are interested in. This allows you to tailor your content and products to meet real customer preferences.

Technically, Answer the Public gathers data from search engines and presents them in a visual map, showing the most common questions and concerns about your company, competitors, or industry.

How can startups benefit from this tool?

Used properly, Answer the Public allows you to identify market trends quickly, discover what matters most to your audience, and refine your communication strategy.

• Visual representation of customer queries
• Insights into trending questions
• Content inspiration to create targeted marketing messaging
• CPC estimations
• Search behavior comparison

08 SurveyMonkey – for creating surveys and gathering feedback

It’s not a secret knowledge that gathering primary data is one of the best market research methods. And here, SurveyMonkey enters the stage.

SurveyMonkey is an AI-boosted tool for startups that need to do primary market research and gather insights directly from their focus groups.

It allows you to create, distribute, and analyze surveys quickly and easily, helping you understand your prospects and existing customers’ preferences, satisfaction, and needs.

So, SurveyMonkey allows you to collect valuable data about your specific market dynamics and analyze the results in real time.

Such primary research is absolutely crucial for startups looking to refine their products, improve customer service, adjust business strategy, or validate new ideas.

What about AI?

Well, the tool created the artificial intelligence assistant called SurveyMonkey Genius.

It can create a survey from a prompt, score your survey, and give recommendations to make it even more accurate for your market research purposes.

• Easy survey creation and distribution
• Customizable survey templates
• Survey recipients’ segmentation
• AI SurveyMonkey Genius

09 Tableau – for visualizing and analyzing complex data sets

The market research process generates a lot of data. Digging through them might be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Therefore, you need a tool to organize it into a more digestible form.

Moreover, by turning raw data into clear graphs and charts, you can easily spot patterns and identify trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to Tableau.

Tableau is a data visualization tool perfect for startups needing to make sense of complex market data.

It allows you to create interactive and shareable dashboards, turning raw data into visual insights that are easy to understand.

Tableau’s customization options enable you to tailor your dashboards to focus on the metrics that matter most to your startup.

Whether you need to track KPIs, compare market segments, or present data to stakeholders, the tool gives you the flexibility to design visuals that will meet your specific market research goals.

The huge strength of Tableau is its drag-and-drop interface. With it, you can quickly build dashboards that provide real-time insights, helping you stay agile and responsive to market changes.

• Real-time analytics
• Easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface
• Shareable dashboards
• Integrates with multiple data sources

10 Make My Persona – for creating detailed customer personas

Make My Persona is a free tool belonging to HubSpot’s suite of marketing tools that helps you create detailed buyer personas for your business.

Why should you even care? And what’s the point of creating buyer personas for market research?

Well, creating personas is like building a roadmap to understand your customers better so you can serve them better, which is key to growing your startup.

Makes My Persona guides you through the process of building these personas step by step.

It asks you the right questions about your ideal customers, such as their age, job, interests, and challenges, so you can create a clear and detailed profile of who they are.

Then, Makes My Persona generates a personalized, easy-to-use template to refer to whenever you launch a new marketing campaign.

This ensures your efforts are always in line with the needs and preferences of your ideal customers, making your marketing more focused and effective.

• Customizable Persona Templates
• Easy download and share
• User-friendly process of creating buyer personas

I personally tested all the tools on the list – from Brand24 and its impressive media monitoring capabilities to Makes My Persona’s intuitive persona-building process – and recommend them with all my heart!

These tools provide the data and insights that truly streamline your market research process. They help you understand your business niche, competitors, audience, industry trends, and more.

Of course, no tool will replace human creativity and strategic thinking. But that’s exactly what these tools are for.

They free up your time from boring & time-consuming tasks so you can focus on what’s really important – driving innovation, making strategic plans, and leading your startup to the gate of success.

Final thoughts:

• Thorough research is crucial for avoiding common startup mistakes, like poor product-market fit and wrong marketing strategies.
• Modern market research tools l ike Brand24 have implemented AI features that streamline the whole process.
• While no tool can replace your creativity and strategic thinking, properly used market research time can free you from boring and time-consuming tasks.

Looking for a top market research tool for your startup? Your search is over! Test Brand24 for free and check by yourself how it will change your life for the better!

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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

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

Download Free

All fields are required.

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.

What is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?

9 Best Marketing Research Methods to Know Your Buyer Better [+ Examples]

SWOT Analysis: How To Do One [With Template & Examples]

28 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

TAM, SAM & SOM: What Do They Mean & How Do You Calculate Them?

How to Run a Competitor Analysis [Free Guide]

5 Challenges Marketers Face in Understanding Audiences [New Data + Market Researcher Tips]

Causal Research: The Complete Guide

Total Addressable Market (TAM): What It Is & How You Can Calculate It

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

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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Top Tools and Software for Market Research Analysts

Introduction.

Market Research Analysts Tools and Software play a crucial role in today’s business world by providing valuable insights. Utilizing tools and software can significantly improve efficiency and accuracy in market research analysis.

With the vast amount of data available, tools like SPSS and SAS help analysts interpret data effectively and make informed decisions.

Furthermore, software such as Tableau and Power BI allow analysts to visualize data in a compelling way, making it easier to communicate findings to stakeholders.

Using tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush assists in tracking online consumer behavior and optimizing digital marketing strategies.

Market research analysts can also leverage social listening tools like Brandwatch and Hootsuite to monitor brand sentiment and trends on social media platforms.

Moreover, survey tools like SurveyMonkey enable analysts to gather feedback from target audiences quickly and efficiently.

By incorporating these tools and software into their workflow, market research analysts can streamline their processes and deliver more impactful insights to drive business growth.

Data Collection Tools

Various tools like surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups for collecting primary data.

Data collection tools are essential for market research analysts to gather valuable insights from target audiences. Surveys are a popular tool that enables analysts to reach a broad audience quickly. By designing well-structured surveys, analysts can collect quantitative data on consumer preferences, behaviors, and opinions. Online survey platforms like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms make distribution and data analysis easier. Questionnaires offer another effective method for collecting primary data. They are often used in conjunction with surveys to gather more detailed responses. Analysts can customize questionnaires to target specific demographic groups, ensuring the data collected is relevant. Tools like Typeform and Qualtrics help create interactive and engaging questionnaires, improving response rates. Focus groups provide qualitative insights that are invaluable for understanding consumer attitudes and motivations. By bringing together a small group of participants, analysts can facilitate in-depth discussions on specific topics. This method allows for the exploration of complex issues and the discovery of underlying factors influencing consumer behavior. Tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams enable virtual focus groups, expanding the reach to a global audience.

How These Tools Help in Gathering Valuable Insights from Target Audiences

Each data collection tool serves a unique purpose in market research. Surveys are ideal for gathering large amounts of data quickly, making them perfect for assessing general trends and preferences. Questionnaires allow for more detailed, targeted responses, providing deeper insights into specific areas of interest. Focus groups offer a rich, qualitative understanding of consumer behavior, helping analysts to interpret data beyond mere numbers. The choice of data collection tool depends on the research objectives. Analysts must consider factors like the target audience, the type of data needed, and the resources available. For example, if an analyst aims to understand broad consumer trends, a survey might be the most efficient tool. On the other hand, if the goal is to explore consumer perceptions of a new product, a focus group could provide more meaningful insights. Effective use of these tools requires careful planning and execution. Analysts must design surveys and questionnaires that are clear, concise, and aligned with research goals. In focus groups, skilled moderation is crucial to ensure that discussions remain productive and relevant. By combining these tools, market research analysts can develop a comprehensive understanding of their target audience, leading to more informed business decisions. Basically, data collection tools like surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups are indispensable for market research analysts. These tools help gather valuable insights from target audiences, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions. By selecting the appropriate tool and executing it effectively, analysts can uncover the information needed to drive success in competitive markets.

Data Analysis Software

Popular software like spss, r, and tableau used for analyzing collected data.

Market research analysts rely on powerful data analysis software to interpret and extract insights from large datasets. Popular tools like SPSS, R, and Tableau stand out for their capabilities in handling complex data. SPSS, or Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is widely used for its user-friendly interface. It simplifies data analysis by offering pre-built statistical tests and procedures. Analysts can perform descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and hypothesis testing without needing extensive programming skills. SPSS also supports data manipulation, allowing users to clean and prepare data efficiently. The software’s ability to generate detailed reports and visualizations makes it a favorite among professionals who need to present findings to non-technical audiences. R, a programming language and software environment, is another vital tool for data analysis. Known for its flexibility, R allows analysts to perform a wide range of statistical and graphical techniques. It supports linear and nonlinear modeling, time-series analysis, and clustering, among other functions. R’s open-source nature means it’s continuously updated with new packages and tools developed by the global community. This adaptability makes R particularly useful for analysts who need to customize their analysis processes. Although R requires more programming knowledge than SPSS, its extensive libraries and active community make it an invaluable resource for in-depth data analysis. Tableau is a data visualization software that transforms raw data into interactive, easy-to-understand visual representations. Its drag-and-drop interface allows analysts to create charts, graphs, and dashboards without needing advanced coding skills. Tableau’s ability to connect with multiple data sources, including spreadsheets, databases, and cloud services, makes it versatile in handling various data types. One of Tableau’s most significant benefits is its ability to generate real-time visualizations. Analysts can quickly spot trends, patterns, and outliers, enabling faster decision-making. Additionally, Tableau’s sharing and collaboration features make it easy to distribute insights across teams or organizations, enhancing communication and alignment.

Features and Benefits in Simplifying Complex Data Analysis Processes

These tools—SPSS, R, and Tableau—offer unique advantages that make data analysis more manageable and effective. SPSS is ideal for those who prefer a straightforward, menu-driven interface for statistical analysis. R provides unmatched flexibility and customization for those with a strong programming background. Tableau excels in turning complex data into intuitive visualizations that can be shared easily across an organization.

Incorporating these tools into the workflow enables market research analysts to handle data with greater efficiency and accuracy. The ability to analyze, interpret, and visualize data effectively is crucial in making informed decisions that drive business success. By leveraging SPSS, R, and Tableau, analysts can enhance their analytical capabilities, leading to more insightful market research outcomes.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Tools like hootsuite and brandwatch for monitoring trends, sentiment, and competitor activities on social media platforms.

Social media monitoring tools are essential for market research analysts. Tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch offer powerful features for tracking trends, sentiment, and competitor activities. These platforms allow analysts to monitor social media platforms in real-time, providing insights into consumer behavior and preferences. Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management tool that helps analysts monitor multiple social media channels simultaneously. By using Hootsuite, analysts can track specific keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across various platforms. This monitoring capability allows analysts to stay informed about industry trends and competitor activities. Hootsuite also provides detailed analytics and reports, enabling analysts to measure the impact of social media campaigns and identify areas for improvement. Brandwatch, on the other hand, focuses on deep social listening and sentiment analysis. This tool helps analysts understand how consumers feel about brands, products, or topics. By analyzing the sentiment behind social media posts, Brandwatch allows analysts to gauge public opinion and identify potential issues before they escalate. This sentiment analysis is crucial for understanding consumer behavior and making informed decisions.

How These Tools Aid in Understanding Consumer Behavior and Preferences

Both Hootsuite and Brandwatch offer valuable insights into consumer preferences. By monitoring social media conversations, analysts can identify emerging trends and shifts in consumer behavior. These insights help companies tailor their marketing strategies to meet consumer demands. For example, if Brandwatch reveals that consumers are increasingly interested in sustainable products, a company can adjust its marketing messages to highlight its eco-friendly initiatives. Moreover, these tools enable analysts to keep a close eye on competitor activities. By tracking competitor mentions and campaigns, analysts can gain a competitive edge. Hootsuite and Brandwatch provide detailed reports on competitor performance, allowing analysts to benchmark their strategies against industry leaders. This information is crucial for identifying opportunities to differentiate a brand and stay ahead of the competition. In addition to monitoring trends and competitors, social media monitoring tools help analysts understand consumer preferences. By analyzing the types of content that resonate with audiences, analysts can refine their marketing messages and create more engaging campaigns. For instance, if Hootsuite data shows that video content receives higher engagement, a company might invest more in video marketing to capture consumer attention. Furthermore, these tools provide real-time feedback on marketing efforts. By tracking the performance of social media posts and campaigns, analysts can quickly identify what works and what doesn’t. This real-time feedback loop allows companies to adjust their strategies on the fly, ensuring that they remain responsive to consumer needs and preferences. In essence, social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch are invaluable for market research analysts. They provide critical insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and competitor activities. By leveraging these tools, analysts can make data-driven decisions that enhance marketing strategies and drive business success.

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SEO and Keyword Research Tools

Tools like semrush and google keyword planner for identifying relevant keywords and optimizing content for search engines.

SEO and keyword research tools are essential for market research analysts aiming to enhance online visibility and attract target audiences. Tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner play a crucial role in identifying relevant keywords, optimizing content, and ensuring that the right audience finds the content. SEMrush is a powerful tool for keyword research and competitive analysis. It allows analysts to explore keyword trends, search volumes, and competitor strategies. By analyzing competitors’ keyword usage, analysts can identify opportunities to rank higher in search engine results. SEMrush also provides insights into the keywords that competitors are using successfully, enabling analysts to refine their strategies and target the right audience. Google Keyword Planner is another indispensable tool for keyword research. It provides data on keyword search volumes, trends, and competition levels. Analysts can use this information to select the most effective keywords for their content. By targeting high-volume, low-competition keywords, analysts can improve their content’s chances of ranking well in search results. Google Keyword Planner also helps in discovering new keyword ideas that may have been overlooked, broadening the scope of content optimization.

How these tools help in enhancing online visibility and attracting target audience

These tools enhance online visibility by ensuring that content aligns with what users are searching for. When analysts identify and use the right keywords, they increase the likelihood of their content appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs). This increased visibility drives more organic traffic to websites, which is crucial for attracting a target audience.

SEMrush also offers features like site audits and backlink analysis, which are vital for optimizing a website’s SEO performance. Site audits identify technical issues that could be hindering search engine rankings, such as broken links or slow page load times. Backlink analysis helps analysts understand the quality and quantity of links pointing to their site, which is a key factor in search engine rankings. By addressing these issues, analysts can further enhance their content’s visibility and attract more visitors. Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner also support content strategy by helping analysts identify content gaps and opportunities. For example, if a particular keyword has high search volume but limited quality content available, it presents an opportunity to create content that fulfills that demand. This targeted content can attract the right audience and establish the brand as an authority in that niche. Essentially, SEO and keyword research tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner are indispensable for market research analysts. They help identify relevant keywords, optimize content, and enhance online visibility. By effectively utilizing these tools, analysts can attract their target audience, drive organic traffic, and ultimately achieve their marketing goals.

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Market Segmentation Tools

Tools like nielsen and surveymonkey for segmenting target markets based on demographics, psychographics, and behavior.

Market segmentation is vital for tailoring marketing strategies to specific audience groups. Tools like Nielsen and SurveyMonkey play a significant role in this process. Nielsen offers comprehensive data analytics that helps segment markets effectively. It provides insights into demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior. Businesses can use Nielsen’s data to understand consumer preferences and trends. SurveyMonkey allows users to create custom surveys to gather primary data. It helps collect responses based on demographics, psychographics, and behavioral patterns. This tool is particularly useful for obtaining direct feedback from consumers. Segmenting markets based on demographics involves categorizing consumers by age, gender, income, and education. Nielsen’s demographic reports offer detailed information to target audiences more precisely. Psychographic segmentation focuses on lifestyle, values, and personality traits. Both Nielsen and SurveyMonkey provide tools to analyze these aspects. This type of segmentation helps businesses understand what drives consumer preferences beyond basic demographics. Behavioral segmentation divides consumers based on purchasing behavior and usage patterns. Nielsen tracks consumer buying habits and preferences, offering insights into how different segments interact with products. SurveyMonkey captures behavioral data through tailored survey questions.

The Importance of Market Segmentation in Creating Tailored Marketing Strategies

Using these tools, businesses can craft more targeted and effective marketing strategies. Segmenting markets ensures marketing messages resonate with specific audience groups. This approach enhances campaign success and improves ROI. Effective segmentation allows businesses to focus their resources on the most promising market segments. It enables the creation of personalized messages and offers that meet the unique needs of each segment. This personalization increases customer engagement and loyalty. Nielsen and SurveyMonkey provide more than just identification of target segments. They offer actionable insights that help refine marketing strategies. Understanding consumer behavior through segmentation allows businesses to adapt their marketing efforts accordingly. In short, market segmentation tools like Nielsen and SurveyMonkey are essential for modern marketing. They enable businesses to segment their target markets effectively and develop strategies aligned with consumer needs. Leveraging these tools leads to greater precision in marketing efforts and better overall results.

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Competitive Analysis Software

Software like similarweb and spyfu for tracking competitors’ online activities, keywords, and traffic sources.

Competitive analysis software is essential for market research analysts to gain insights into competitors’ strategies. Tools like SimilarWeb and SpyFu are invaluable for tracking various aspects of competitors’ online presence. SimilarWeb provides a comprehensive view of a competitor’s web traffic, detailing sources and user engagement. Analysts can use this tool to gauge the volume of traffic competitors receive and identify where it comes from, such as search engines or social media platforms. SpyFu focuses on keyword analysis and SEO strategies. It reveals the keywords competitors are targeting and their performance in search engine rankings. Analysts can see which keywords drive traffic to competitors’ sites, allowing them to adjust their own keyword strategies accordingly. SpyFu also offers insights into competitors’ paid advertising efforts, including ad spending and effectiveness.

How these tools aid in benchmarking against competitors and identifying growth opportunities

Both SimilarWeb and SpyFu are crucial for benchmarking against competitors. SimilarWeb allows analysts to compare their website’s traffic and sources with those of competitors. This benchmarking helps in assessing market position and identifying areas where competitors excel or underperform. By examining the data from SimilarWeb, analysts can pinpoint trends and make strategic adjustments to their own marketing efforts. This information also helps in understanding audience demographics and interests, which can be used to refine targeting strategies. SpyFu enhances benchmarking by providing detailed insights into competitors’ keyword strategies. Analysts can compare the keywords driving traffic to their competitors’ sites with their own keyword performance. This comparison helps in identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement. SpyFu’s data on competitors’ paid advertising strategies also aids in refining advertising campaigns and optimizing budget allocation. Analysts can see which ads are most effective and adjust their own campaigns to achieve better results. Overall, these tools reveal growth opportunities by highlighting areas where competitors have a competitive edge. They allow analysts to explore new markets, adjust strategies, and innovate based on real-time data. By leveraging SimilarWeb and SpyFu, market research analysts can stay ahead of competitors and make informed decisions that drive business growth. et research industry for competitive analysis are SimilarWeb and SpyFu.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

Tools like salesforce and hubspot for managing customer relationships, tracking interactions, and analyzing customer data.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are essential for market research analysts. Salesforce and HubSpot are two popular CRM platforms that help manage customer relationships effectively. Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite for sales, customer service, and marketing. Analysts use it to track interactions and store detailed customer profiles. The platform’s advanced analytics provide deep insights into customer behavior and trends. HubSpot, known for its user-friendly interface, integrates CRM with marketing automation. This integration allows analysts to manage customer interactions and personalize marketing efforts seamlessly. HubSpot also offers tools for tracking customer interactions and analyzing data, providing a well-rounded view of customer engagement.

How CRM tools help in improving customer retention and personalizing marketing campaigns

CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot are pivotal in improving customer retention. They offer insights into customer preferences and behavior, which helps in crafting personalized marketing strategies. By analyzing customer data, companies can tailor their marketing campaigns to meet specific needs and interests. For example, CRM tools enable segmentation of customers based on various criteria such as purchase history and preferences. This segmentation allows analysts to create targeted messages and offers, enhancing the relevance of marketing campaigns. Personalized campaigns are more effective in engaging customers and fostering loyalty. CRM tools also improve customer service by providing a centralized platform for managing inquiries and issues. Analysts can use these tools to track and resolve customer problems efficiently. This leads to better customer satisfaction and strengthens retention efforts. Furthermore, CRM tools support strategic planning by offering valuable data insights. Analysts can identify market trends and customer needs, helping companies adjust their strategies accordingly. This data-driven approach ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with customer expectations. In summary, CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot are crucial for managing customer relationships, tracking interactions, and analyzing data. They significantly enhance customer retention by personalizing marketing campaigns and improving service. Investing in effective CRM tools can greatly benefit companies by fostering stronger customer connections and driving business growth.

Tools and software are crucial for market research analysts. They provide valuable insights that drive business success. By using these tools, analysts gather accurate and comprehensive data. This data helps companies make informed decisions. Understanding market trends, customer behavior, and competitive landscapes becomes easier with the right software. Analysts can quickly analyze large data sets and uncover actionable insights. Effective tools streamline data collection and analysis processes. They enable analysts to process data efficiently and accurately. This efficiency leads to faster decision-making and more strategic business planning. With up-to-date software, companies stay ahead of industry trends. They can adapt their strategies based on real-time information. Advanced tools offer features like predictive analytics and data visualization. Predictive analytics help forecast future trends and behaviors. Data visualization simplifies complex data, making it easier to understand and communicate. These features are vital for presenting clear and persuasive reports. Staying competitive requires constant adaptation to market changes. Tools and software help analysts monitor competitors and market shifts. They provide insights into emerging trends and potential opportunities. Businesses can adjust their strategies proactively rather than reactively.

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The 8 Best Market Research Tools

• By Hailey Friedman
• December 4, 2019 March 24, 2021
• Recent Posts

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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

Hailey Friedman

Semrush vs Ubersuggest

• By Mark Spera ,
• March 15, 2022 March 16, 2022

Affiliate Marketing: How We’ll Make $90,648 this Year With One Link

• June 2, 2022 February 16, 2023

How to Grow a SaaS (Software) Business FAST

• November 11, 2023 August 5, 2024

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Enhance Clear Interpretation of Data With Top 10 Market Research Reporting Tools

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A leading business doesn’t only focus on offering products or services; it also puts great significance on understanding and adapting to the evolving market dynamic. In the era where data reigns, you need tools that help you unlock the potential hidden within the vast amount of data. 

Market research reporting tool is a powerful ally for all businesses, enabling you to navigate intricately through the market, customer preferences, and competition. The tool offers clarity with comprehensible reports, dynamic visualization, and precise analysis. It can transform complex data into strategic patterns, enabling you to transcend guesswork and make informed decisions. 

Here, we’ll explore market research platforms that offer powerful reporting tools, allowing you to harness the true potential of data. 

What is a market research reporting tool?

An MR reporting software helps gather, analyze, interpret, and visualize data comprehensively. It transforms the raw data into meaningful insights with data visualization and reporting capabilities to guide strategic decision-making. 

The tool provides a structured and efficient way to present data, enabling you to draw meaningful conclusions, identify trends, and make informed decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. 

The key functions of a market research reporting tool include data visualization, report generation, trend analysis , benchmarking, and a custom dashboard. The tool should be able to handle various data types and should enable you to visualize data tailored to your needs. 

Read how Voxco helps MR firm Phase 5 achieve ↗ faster turnaround & ↑ higher completion rates.

What are the key features to look for in a market research reporting tool.

Selecting the right MR reporting tools is crucial to ensure that you can efficiently gather, analyze, and interpret data to make informed decisions. Let’s look into the key features you should consider when evaluating a market research report tool. 

• User-friendly interface: 

Consider a tool that offers an intuitive interface, allowing your non-technical users to navigate and create reports easily. A user-friendly interface enhances the adoption of the tool across the organization. 

• Data analysis: 

The tool should allow real-time data analysis for quantitative and qualitative data. It should offer analytical capabilities like cross-tab, regression analysis, Max-Diff, text analysis, and sentient analysis to help you uncover deeper insights. 

• Data integration: 

Ensure the market research reporting tool seamlessly integrates with other data sources, like your CRM. 

• Data visualization: 

Choose a tool that offers a wide variety of data visualization options, such as charts, graphs, tables, etc., to present data meaningfully and visually appealingly. 

• Real-time reporting:

Make sure the tool offers real-time insights to help you make time-sensitive decisions with changing markets. 

• Customizable dashboard: 

Look for tools that allow you to create a customized dashboard with drag-and-drop functionality to focus on relevant business metrics. 

• Data security: 

The tool should offer robust security measures like role-based access, MFA, and encryption and comply with the highest data security and privacy standards. 

Top 10 market research reporting tools

Let’s look at some of the top reporting tools that can help you give meaning to your market research data. 

A one-stop-shop insights platform, Voxco offers you all the tools you need to conduct your own market research. You can design your surveys, collect data across multiple channels, and analyze, report, and visualize data within one platform. 

The platform helps you gather data from the intended audience and transform collected data into actionable insights. 

Key features: 

• Omnichannel survey data collection. 
• Advanced statistical and text analysis. 
• Real-time reporting to quickly access the latest insights. 
• Customizable dashboard to tailor reports to your organization’s needs. 
• Data security with MFA, user-based access, encryption, and more. 
• GDPR compliant. 

Check out Voxco Online features to see how it can help you unlock the power of data with its robust functionalities.

• 40+ Question Types
• Advanced logic 
• White-label
• Auto-translations in 100+ languages

A widely recognized data visualization tool, Tableau empowers you to create visually appealing and interactive research reports. 

• Build an interactive, drag-and-drop dashboard and allow users to explore data. 
• Combine data from multiple sources to uncover hidden insights and correlations. 
• Real-time data and up-to-the-minute reporting. 
• The market research reporting tool offers a wide range of visualization options. 
• Share reports securely with your colleagues to encourage collaborative decision-making. 

3. Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and data analytics tool that allows you to create insightful reports and dashboards. 

• Create data reports and dashboards using a drag-and-drop interface without any coding knowledge. 
• Integrate the platform with other data sources to get a comprehensive view if your customers, businesses, and more. 
• Get AI-generated insights and recommendations with its AI-powered insights based on your data. 

4. QlikView

Known for its associative data model, QlikView allows you to freely explore relationships between data and uncover insights. 

• Discover hidden insights with its Associative Data Model by exploring data relationships intuitively. 
• Dynamic charts and graphs that update as you interact with the data. 
• Share and collaborate on reports and dashboards within the platform. 
• Data governance tool to maintain control over data quality and consistency. 

The data experience platform provides a cloud-based platform for business intelligence and reporting. Domo enables you to transform data into insights and actions.

• Self-service to custom pro-code options for the dashboard. 
• Seamlessly connects with your existing cloud and legacy system for a unified view of your data. 
• Automated real-time reporting to discover insights in moments that matter. 
• Set up alerts that notify you when key data changes. 
• An interactive and customizable dashboard that tells data stories. 
• Build live visualization with 150+ chart types. 

Looking for the World’s best Survey Platform?

Voxco is the leading online survey tool that annually powers over 50Mn+ surveys.

6. Statista

As a data visualization website, Statista takes data from reports across the internet and converts them into a digestible format for researchers or marketers. The platform updates the chart with the most recent research data, ensuring reliability. 

• Access to data across 150+ countries. 
• Interactive charts that simplify complex data and make it easy to understand. 
• The platform publishes detailed industry reports providing in-depth market, customer, and competition analysis. 

7. PureSpectrum

Another market research reporting tool in our list is PureSpectrum. The platform helps streamline the market research process with its end-to-end solution, enabling you to add a data-driven point of view to make informed decisions. 

• Access to near-instant results gives you a view of the progress of your research. 
• Visualize your data with easy-to-understand graphs and charts. 
• Create data visualizations that you can export easily for presentation or reporting. 
• Download your research result and customize visualization in your existing workflow. 

8. Qualtrics

A comprehensive AI-based platform, Qualtrics offers an easy-to-use, end-to-end market research platform with robust analysis and reporting capabilities. 

Key feature: 

• Predictive intelligence and statistical analysis tools help discover correlations, patterns, and trends. 
• The results report gives you a simple visualization of each question. 
• Customization helps you build data reports that fit your needs. 
• You can change a wide range of visualization types by selecting the corresponding icon. 
• Change the source of data you want to visualize. 

9. SurveyMonkey

A powerful analysis tool, SurveyMonkey, offers you user-friendly software with a basic analysis tool and straightforward data visualization capabilities. 

• View and analyze survey data at any time during the process of data collection. 
• See a summary of your data. 
• Browse individual survey responses. 
• Create dynamic charts and export them. 
• Filter and compare data to analyze specific data. 

10. SoGolytics

Last on our list of market research reporting tools is SoGolytics. The platform enables you to design sophisticated surveys and interpret data efficiently. 

• Reporting options and templates enable you to analyze complex data and display insights. 
• Generate separate survey analysis reports for different locations or departments. 
• Share live report URLs securely with your team. 

What is the need for market research reporting tools?

Market research reporting tools make the transition from data collection to strategic decision-making seamless and efficient. Let’s look into some benefits of reporting software. 

• Reporting tools provide access to accurate and reliable data, enabling you to make decisions based on factual insights and not assumptions. 
• The tool provides real-time insights and helps you assess business risk with data-driven insights. 
• By understanding and analyzing customer preferences and behavior, the tool allows you to tailor products, services, and marketing efforts to customer needs and priorities. 
• It also allows you to identify drivers of customer churn, thus helping you initiate preventive measures to retain valuable customers. 
• The tools enable you to develop innovative products/services by identifying the evolving demands and needs. 

Voxco helps the top 50 MR firms & 500+ global brands gather omnichannel feedback, measure sentiment, uncover insights, and act on them.

See how voxco can enhance your research efficiency..

Market research reporting tools are indispensable. It helps you leverage the true potential of data gathered first-hand and make informed business decisions. The tool is a valuable asset for businesses striving to enhance customer loyalty, drive business growth, and maintain a competitive edge. 

• What is the main tool used to collect data about the market?

Online surveys are the most popular tools used to gather market insights. Platforms like Voxco allow you to design and distribute surveys to your target audience. The surveys help you gauge customer preference, behavior, trends, pain points, and more. 

• How do you report market research?

Market research reports should include meaningful insights in a clear and structured format. 

• Executive summary of the research objective, methods, key findings, and recommendations. 
• Introduction about the research topic. 
• Methodology used for data collection, sample size, and data analysis. 
• Findings of the research. 
• Analysis of data, including key trends and patterns.
• Recommendations or actionable suggestions based on the result. 
• Conclusion emphasizing the key points. 

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What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It?

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To see what Databox can do for you, including how it helps you track and visualize your performance data in real-time, check out our home page. Click here .

There is nothing more embarrassing for a marketer than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t quite address the business questions that we need to answer.” And unfortunately, this is a rather common occurrence in market research reporting that most marketers would care to admit.

So, why do most market research reports fail to meet client expectations? Well, in most cases, because there is more emphasis on methodology and analytic techniques used to craft the report rather than relying on data visualization, creative story-telling, and outlining actionable direction/steps.

Now, our next big question is, how do you avoid your client’s dreaded deer-in-the-headlights reaction when presenting such a report? This blog post will answer this and much more, as we go through the following:

What Is a Market Research Report?

Why is market research important, differences between primary and secondary market research, types of market research, market research reports advantages and disadvantages, how to do market research, how to prepare a market research report: 5 steps, marketing research report templates, marketing research reports best practices, bring your market research reports a step further with databox.

The purpose of creating a market research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas. Market research is done to evaluate the feasibility of a new product or service, through research conducted with potential consumers. The information obtained from conducting market research is then documented in a formal report that should contain the following details:

• The characteristics of your ideal customers
• You customers buying habits
• The value your product or service can bring to those customers
• A list of your top competitors

Every business aims to provide the best possible product or service at the lowest cost possible. Simply said, market research is important because it helps you understand your customers and determine whether the product or service that you are about to launch is worth the effort.

Here is an example of a customer complaint that may result in more detailed market research:

Suppose you sell widgets, and you want your widget business to succeed over the long term. Over the years, you have developed many different ways of making widgets. But a couple of years ago, a customer complained that your widgets were made of a cheap kind of foam that fell apart after six months. You didn’t think at the time that this was a major problem, but now you know it.

The customer is someone you really want to keep. So, you decide to research this complaint. You set up a focus group of people who use widgets and ask them what they think about the specific problem. After the conducted survey you’ll get a better picture of customer opinions, so you can either decide to make the changes regarding widget design or just let it go.

PRO TIP: How Well Are Your Marketing KPIs Performing?

Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. How much traffic and new contact conversions do you get? How many new contacts do you get from organic sessions? How are your email campaigns performing? How well are your landing pages converting? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.

Our Marketing Overview Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics 4 and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:

• Sessions . The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.
• New Contacts from Sessions . How well is your campaign driving new contacts and customers?
• Marketing Performance KPIs . Tracking the number of MQLs, SQLs, New Contacts and similar will help you identify how your marketing efforts contribute to sales.
• Email Performance . Measure the success of your email campaigns from HubSpot. Keep an eye on your most important email marketing metrics such as number of sent emails, number of opened emails, open rate, email click-through rate, and more.
• Blog Posts and Landing Pages . How many people have viewed your blog recently? How well are your landing pages performing?

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring your leads. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics 4 accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Marketing research requires both primary and secondary market research. But what does that mean and what are the main differences?

Primary market research takes in information directly from customers, usually as participants in surveys. Usually, it is consisted of:

• Exploratory Primary Research – This type of research helps to identify possible problem areas, and it’s not focused on discovering specific information about customers. As with any research, exploratory primary research should be conducted carefully. Researchers need to craft an interviewing or surveying plan, and gather enough respondents to ensure reasonable levels of statistical reliability.
• Specific Primary Research – This type of research is one of the best ways to approach a problem because it relies on existing customer data. Specific research provides a deeper, more thorough understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. The greatest advantage of specific research is that it lets you explore a very specific question, and focus on a specific problem or an opportunity.

Secondary market research collects information from other sources such as databases, trend reports, market or government statistics, industry content, etc. We can divide secondary market research into 3 categories:

• Public market data – Public sources range from academic journals and government reports to tax returns and court documents. These sources aren’t always easy to find. Many are available only in print in libraries and archives. You have to look beyond search engines like Google to find public source documents.
• Commercial data – Those are typically created by specialized agencies like Pew, Gartner or Forrester. the research agencies are quite expensive, but they provide a lot of useful information.
• Internal data – Your organization’s databases are gold mines for market research. In the best cases, your salespeople can tell you what they think about customers. Your salespeople are your direct sources of information about the market. Don’t underestimate your internal data.

In general, primary research is more reliable than secondary research, because researchers have to interview people directly. But primary research is expensive and time-consuming. Secondary research can be quicker and less expensive.

There are plenty of ways to conduct marketing research reports. Mostly, the type of research done will depend on your goals. Here are some types of market research often conducted by marketers.

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.

An interview is an interactive process of asking and answering questions and observing your respondent’s responses. Interviews are one of the most commonly used tools in market research . An interview allows an organization to observe, in detail, how its consumers interact with its products and services. It also allows an organization to address specific questions.

A focus group is a group of people who get together to discuss a particular topic. A moderator leads the discussion and takes notes. The main benefit of focus groups is that they are quick and easy to conduct. You can gather a group of carefully-selected people, give them a product to try out, and get their feedback within a few hours/days.

Product or service use research helps you obtain useful information about your product or service such as:

• What your current customers do with the product/service
• Which features of the product/service are particularly important to your customers
• What they dislike about the product/service
• What they would change about the product/service

Observation-based research helps you to observe your target audience interacting with your product or service. You will see the interactions and which aspects work well and which could be improved. The main point is to directly experience the feedback from your target audience’s point of view.

Personas are an essential sales tool. By knowing your buyers’ pain points and the challenges they face, you can create better content, target messaging, and campaigns for them. Buyer persona research is based on market research, and it’s built around data that describes your customers’ demographics, behaviors, motivations, and concerns. Sales reporting software can significantly help you develop buyer personas when you gain insights after you collected all information.

Market segmentation research is carried out to better understand existing and potential market segments. The objective is to determine how to target different market segments and how they differ from each other. The three most important steps in writing a market segmentation research report are:

• Defining the problem
• Determining the solution [and]
• Defining the market

Related : 9 Customer Segmentation Tips to Personalize Ecommerce Marketing and Drive More Sales

A price that is too high, or too low, can kill a business. And without good market research, you don’t really know what is a good price for your product. Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy.

In a competitive analysis, you define your “competition” as any other entity that competes with you in your market, whether you’re selling a widget or a piece of real estate. With competitive analysis research, you can find out things like:

• Who your competitors are
• What they’ve done in the past
• What’s working well for them
• Their weaknesses
• How they’re positioned in the market
• How they market themselves
• What they’re doing that you’re not

Related : How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

In today’s marketplace, companies are increasingly focused on customer loyalty. What your customers want is your product, but, more importantly, they want it delivered with a service that exceeds their expectations. Successful companies listen to their customers and respond accordingly. That’s why customer satisfaction and loyalty research is a critical component of that basic equation.

Related : 11 Tactics for Effectively Measuring Your Customer Service ROI

Who you are, what you stand for, what you offer, what you believe in, and what your audience thinks of you is all wrapped up in brand. Brand awareness research tells what your target audience knows about your brand and what’s their experience like.

A campaign research report is a detailed account of how your marketing campaign performed. It includes all the elements that went into creating the campaign: planning, implementation, and measurement.

Here are some of the top advantages and disadvantages of doing market research and crafting market research reports.

• Identify business opportunities – A market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.
• A clear understanding of your customers – A market report gives company’s marketing department an in-depth picture about customers’ needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.
• Mitigates risks – 30% of small businesses fail within the first two years. Why is this so? The answer is that entrepreneurs are risk takers. However, there are risks that could be avoided. A good marketing research will help you identify those risks and allow you to mitigate them.
• Clear data-driven insights – Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

Disadvantages

• It’s not cheap – Although market research can be done for as little as $500, large markets like the United States can run into millions of dollars. If a research is done for a specific product, the budget may be even much higher. The budget also depends on the quality of the research. The more expensive it is, the more time the research will take.
• Some insights could be false – For example, if you are conducting a survey, data may be inadequate or inaccurate because respondents can, well, simply be dishonest and lie.

Here are the essential steps you need to take when doing market research:

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.

The job of a marketing persona is to describe your ideal customer and to tell you what they want, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what limits them. Finding out these things means you have a better chance of designing your products, services, marketing messages, and brand around real customers. There is no one right way to create a buyer persona, though.

For example, if you’re in an industry focused on education, you could include things like:

• Educational level
• Education background

It’s recommended that you create 3-5 buyer personas for your products, based on your ideal customer.

This should be a representative sample of your target customers so you can better understand their behavior. You want to find people who fit both your target personas and who represent the broader demographic of your market. People who recently made a purchase or purposefully decided not to make one are a good sample to start with.

The questions you use determine the quality of your results. Of course, the quality of your results also depends on the quality of your participants.

Don’t ask questions that imply a yes or no answer. Instead, use open questions. For example, if you are researching customers about yogurt products, you could ask them: „ What have you heard about yogurt ?” or “ What do you think of yogurt ?“.

Avoid questions that use numbers, such as “ How many times a week do you eat yogurt ?”

Avoid questions that suggest a set of mutually exclusive answers, such as “ Do you like yogurt for breakfast, lunch, or dinner ?”

Avoid questions that imply a scale, such as “ Do you like chocolate-flavored yogurt ?”

Market researchers sometimes call one company the top competitor, another middle competitor, and the third one small competitor. However you classify them, you want to identify at least three companies in each category. Now, for each business on your list, list its key characteristics. For example, if your business sells running shoes, a key characteristic might be the product’s quality.

Next, make a list of your small business’s competitive advantages. These include the unique qualities or features of your business that make it the best choice of customers for the products or services it offers. Make a list of these competitive advantages and list them next to the key characteristics you listed for your business.

You have just finished writing your marketing research report. Everything is out there quantified or qualified. You just have to sum it up and focus on the most important details that are going to make a big impact on your decisions. Clear summary leads to a winning strategy!

Related : How to Prepare a Complete Marketing Report: The KPIs, Analysis, & Action Plan You Need

Here’s how to prepare a market research report in 5 simple steps:

Step 1: Cluster the data

Step 2: prepare an outline, step 3: mention the research methods, step 4: include visuals with narrative explanations, step 5: conclude the report with recommendations.

Your first step is to cluster all the available information into a manageable set. Clustering is the process of grouping information together in a way that emphasizes commonalities and minimizes differences. So, in market research, this will help to organize all the information you have about a product, service, or target market and identify your focus areas.

A marketing research report should be written so that other people can understand it:

• Include background information at the beginning to explain who your audience is and what problem you are trying to solve for them.
• In the body of the report, include a description of the methodology – Explain to the reader how your research was done, what was involved, and why you selected the methodology you used.
• Also in the body of the report, include the results of your market research. These may be quantitative or qualitative, but either way they should answer the questions you posed at the beginning.
• Include the executive summary – A summary of the entire report.

The market research methodology section includes details on the type of research, sample size, any limitations of the studies, research design, sample selection, data collection procedures, and statistical analyses used.

Visuals are an essential part of the presentation. Even the best-written text can be difficult to understand. Charts and graphs are easier to understand than text alone, and they help the reader see how the numbers fit the bigger picture.

But visuals are not the whole story. They are only one part of the presentation. Visuals are a cue for the reader. The narrative gives the story, not just the numbers.

Recommendations tend to follow logically from conclusions and are a response to a certain problem. The recommendation should always be relevant to the research rationale, that is, the recommendation should be based on the results of the research reported in the body of the report.

Now, let’s take a look at some dashboard reporting templates you could use to enhance your market research:

• Semrush (Position Tracking) Report

Brand Awareness Report

Sales pipeline performance report, customer success overview report, stripe (mrr & churn) report, semrush (position tracking) report template.

This free SEMRush dashboard template will help you monitor how your website’s search visibility on search engines evolves on a monthly basis. This dashboard contains all of the information you need to make changes and improve the ranking results of your business in Google Search.

This Brand Awareness Report will help you to get a sense of your brand awareness performance in Google Analytics, Google Organic Search, and Facebook. Use this dashboard to track brand awareness the same way you track other marketing campaigns.

Are your sales and marketing funnel healthy and growing? How is your sales and marketing funnel performing? What are the key conversion rates between your lifecycle stages? With a pipeline performance dashboard , you’ll get all of the answers quickly.

This Customer Success Overview Dashboard allows you to analyze how your customer service team’s responsiveness impacts your business. Use this dashboard to assess the correlation between your customer service performance and churn rate. 

This Stripe dashboard tracks your churn rate and MRR growth in real-time and shows you which customers (and how many of them) you have at any given point in time. All you have to do to get started is to connect your Stripe account.

As we said earlier, there are no strict rules when it comes to writing marketing research reports. On the other hand, you must find your focus if you want to write a report that will make a difference. Here are some best practices you should keep in mind when writing a research report.

• Objectives – The objective of a market research report is to define the problems, identify key issues, and suggest recommendations for further research. If you answer them successfully, you’re on the right way.
• Don’t worry about the format – Be creative. The report could be in a form of a PowerPoint presentation, Excel sheet, interactive dashboard or even a video. Use the format that best fits your audience, but make sure to make it easy to read.
• Include an executive summary, scorecard , or a dashboard – This is really important because time is money, and most people don’t have time to waste. So, how to put everything important in a short role? Address all of the objectives and put them in a graphic dashboard or scorecard. Also, you can write an executive summary template (heart of the report) that can be easily updated and read by managers or CEOs.
• Use storytelling –  A good story always makes a great point because it’s so memorable. Your research report results can double the effect with a catchy story.
• Keep it short – It’s not a secret that we are reading so little in the digital era. Use a lot of white space and bullet points. Too much text on a page means less focus for the reader.
• Be organized – Maintain the order of information. It’s important for the reader to navigate through the report easily. If they want to find some details or specific information it would be great to divide all sections with appropriate references.
• Methodological information – Methodological details could be boring. Include only the most important details that the reader needs to know to understand the big picture.
• Use images (or other visualizations) whenever you can – A good picture speaks for 1.000 words! If you can communicate the point visually, don’t hesitate to do it. It would be a lot easier for those who don’t like a lot of text to understand your results. But don’t push them where you can’t.
• Create readable graphs – The crown of marketing research reports is a comprehensive graph. Make sure to design precise and attractive graphs that will power up and round your story.
• Use the Appendix  – You can include all secondary information such as methodological details and other miscellaneous data in the Appendix at the end of the report.

Market research reports are all about presenting your data in an easy-to-understand way and making calculated decisions about business ideas. But this is something easier said than done.

When busy stakeholders and executives grab a report, they need something that will give them an idea of the results – the big picture that addresses company wide-business goals.

Can a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF report meet those expectations? Most likely not. But a dashboard can.

Keep in mind that even with the best market analysis in the world, your market research report won’t be actionable if you don’t present the data efficiently and in a way that everyone understands what the next steps are. Databox is your key ally in the matter.

Databox dashboards are designed to help you present your market research data with clarity – from identifying what is influencing your business, and understanding where your brand is situated in the market, to gauging the temperature of your niche or industry before a new product/service launch.

Present your research results with efficient, interactive dashboards now by signing up for a free trial .

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Grew up as a Copywriter. Evolved into the Content creator. Somewhere in between, I fell in love with numbers that can portray the world as well as words or pictures. A naive thinker who believes that the creative economy is the most powerful force in the world!

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