Marketing your business does not have to be expensive, in fact, if you are careful, you can do it for free. The only thing you will need is time because it is true that the best things in life are free. There are other cases where free marketing research tools will cost you money or there are downloadable software’s which you can buy at low costs.
Here is a list of popular free marketing research tools for you to use in finding out all the things your competition is doing right and wrong. I will also show you how to use them.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Tableau Public
Tableau provides you with the tools and data to make your business run more smoothly. With a collaborative environment in which people can explore their own discoveries, Tableau offers insightful analytics that are powerful enough for both individuals and big organizations alike.
It’s Features:
Connectivity: TDE, Access, Excel, Text File (you can not connect Tableau Public to any of the databases)
• Distribution: Cloud (you can not save Tableau Public workbooks locally)
• Account Space: Each account holder will be able to save up to 10 gigabytes (GB) of content to Tableau Public
Pros:
- Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
- Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
- Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
Cons:
- The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is ‘public’ and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
- Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
- Limited connections – can’t connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)
Price: Free
Consumer Barometer
Google has developed a tool to help businesses and marketers better understand their customers. The Consumer Barometer is based on data gathered from tens of thousands of adults in 45 countries who have used Google’s tools, such as YouTube or Gmail. This interactive website uses information about what people are viewing online to determine when they’re most likely shopping for items like jewelry or electronics.
Price: Free
Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan organization that aims to inform the public about issues shaping society. They conduct polling, demographic research and other data-driven social science research in order to make an informed assessment of current trends on various topics such as attitudes and policies across populations around the world.
For more information click here
Price: Free
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic market research tool for basic keyword research. You can create an account on Google Adwords for free to use the Google Keyword Planner. The main task of the tool is looking for the phrases or keywords that are related to your business. In brief, Google Keyword Planner allows you to find new keywords and get a detailed idea about how your audiences are searching for information within your market.
Features
- Research keywords
- Suggestion for daily budget
- Monthly search details
- Column for new competition
- Add new keywords to existing campaigns
Price
Google Keyword Planner is one of the free market research tools.
Statcounter Global Stats
StatCounter is a web analytics service that has installed their tracking code on more than 2 million sites and records billions of page views to these sites every month. Every time someone visits one of the thousands or millions of websites using StatCounter, they are able to determine where in the world it came from, what browser was used as well as screen resolution – even if you’re browsing with your phone! Plus for each page view recorded by Statcounter there’s an analysis about whether they were referred through search engine results (including Google) or social media sources like Facebook.
Pros:
- It’s a free tool which is best to start with website visitor analysis.
- It gives detailed reports for location, browser and time.
- It’s really easy to set up and use. It may just take few moments to set up an account.
Cons
- They need to add a real-time visitor report option on the website. Else, it is a great tool.
Price: Free.
Conclusion
Once a business has a stronger free marketing research tools , its costs of launching a new product or service can be considerably lower. A business that wants to market a new product or service only needs the money to pay for its costs of preparing and placing an ad.