Today’s small businesses face many obstacles with many demands. Finding time to run errands, make phone calls, and mail out invoices is becoming more of a luxury than a necessity. At Cannon Accounting Software , we feel that our customers are spending valuable time doing their actual jobs rather than paperwork. That is why we developed free market research for you!
If you are looking for interesting, reliable financial software – get the top solutions today! We gathered all the best services that will help you to run your small, medium or large business fully automated.
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’ shortcomings.
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!
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:
G2
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:
Statista
Statista is one of the best market research tools for building an online statistic in market research. It gives access to the data from market research institutions and their opinion. You can even get an assessment from business organizations and government institutions in different languages with this tool. Researching various industries helps you to understand the nature of competition. Furthermore, using Statista lets you discover the relative size of the industries, their average expenditures, and individual company expenditures.
Features
- Statistics portal
- Research and analysis
- Content and information design
- eCommerce insights for your business
Price
You can use the basic plan of the Statista for primary data and statistics for free. For the Premium account, you need to buy it for $59 per month, and for a Corporate account, you have to pay $700 per month.
Google Analytics
Though Google Analytics is not a broader tool for providing market research entirely, it can give feedback on how your customers are behaving when they are on your website. It will show you which of your products have more views and fewer sales, or which social media channel is getting more responses from your clients. In a nutshell, Google Analytics helps you to analyze the traffic on your website and give you a complete picture of your visitors and their requisitions.
Features
- Reporting traffic
- Tracking conversion
- Keyword guidance
- Reference of third-parties
- Custom dashboard
Price
If you are a small business that wants to avoid paying monthly fees, you can use their free service. If you want to use a vast amount of features, you can buy the Google Analytics 360 that will cost $150,000 in a year.
U.S. Census Data Tools
A vital part of marketing research is determining your market size, or the potential reach of your products or service. Research to see how many people you could reasonably expect to become your customers. For this type of research, there are the U.S. Census data tools. The site has more than a dozen online market research tools and free industry research reports that help you gain insight into demographics and geographic locations of populations who might be interested in your offerings.
Alexa Tools
Researching your audience is a powerful way to gain insights to use in your marketing intelligence, which is why Alexa is one of the best sites for market research. Using Alexa, you can uncover a variety of details about your audience’s demographics, interests, and habits.Researching your audience is a powerful way to inform your marketing intelligence.CLICK TO TWEET
Audience Overlap Tool
The Audience Overlap Tool allows you to enter your website or up to 10 competitors to see a list of other websites that the audience regularly frequents.
This helps you get to know what other interests your audience has as you can see what other types of websites they use. Demo the tool for free and find similar sites now.
Competitive Keyword Matrix
Using Alexa to create a competitive website analysis is another way to conduct market research. One such tool for performing this analysis is the Competitive Keyword Matrix tool. The Competitive Keyword Matrix helps you get a look at the terms your ideal audience is using in search to find your website and your competitors’ websites. You can use this report to see which terms are leading your target audience to competitors and create a plan to target those similar keywords.
Site Overview
The Site Overview Tool allows you to enter a website and receive a report on the website’s top keywords, traffic sources, audience geography, and other sites with an overlapping audience.
Conclusion
Accounting Software is a free accounting program for small business and personal use. All the software you want is here with this download. This is a powerful and flexible accounts management tool for any small business. It encompasses many features to make your job as simple as possible, including fixed asset management, payroll, bank reconciliations, speed of data entry so you do things faster, and more features to save your time. You can easily manage your accounts, payroll, inventory etc.