Have you ever had a “what market research tools should I use?” or “how to research online adverts?” or “best free advertising research tools” question?
Some market research tools aren’t as well-known as others. In fact, some people don’t know what research tools are at all. It is important to look at them from the standpoint of the advertiser, then from the standpoint of the advertising agency.
Think With Google Research Tools
Wish you had information on your product’s likelihood of success? Think With Google’s marketing research tools offer interesting insights on whether anyone is looking for your product (Google Trends), which markets to launch to (Market Finder), and what retail categories rise as the months and seasons pass (Rising Retail Categories).
If you’d like to market your product through YouTube, the Find My Audience tool allows you to investigate what your potential viewers are interested in and what you should discuss in your brand’s YouTube channel.
Pricing: Free
Census Bureau
The Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching U.S. census data. You can filter by age, income, year, and location. You can also use some of its shortcuts to access visualizations of the data, allowing you to see potential target markets across the country.
One of the best ways to use this tool is by finding the NAICS code for your business, then accessing the Tables tool, then clicking Filter on the sidebar and searching for your industry. Easily find out where your target industry is most popular — or where the market has been oversaturated. Another helpful tool is the Census Bureau Business and Economy data, where you can also target premade tables depending on your industry.
Pricing: Free
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.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a really simple tool that surfaces real-time data from social media platforms. Whether that’s blogs, videos, or Reddit posts, this handy social media scanner works like a search engine, pulling up examples of whatever you search from across the social web.
Social Mention also features sentiment analysis and estimates of mentions per minute. For example, when I searched for ‘bubblewrap’, sentiment analysis revealed that people felt pretty neutral about it, but when I searched for ‘tired’, the sentiment was resoundingly negative.
This market research tool is a quick and simple way to check in on what’s going on in the realms of social media.
Living Facts
(Free)
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
- Democracy
- Demographics
- Faith
- Health
- Money
- Trends
- Work
Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to “connect to virtually any data source.” But the data isn’t presented in unreadable tables. Rather, Tableau helps you visualize this data in a way that helps you glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.
You can visualize data on anything from corn production in tropical climate zones to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look you’d like into potential marketplaces and supplier regions.
Pricing: $12/user/month (Tableau Viewer); $35/user/month (Tableau Explorer); $70/user/month (Tableau Creator)
Remesh
Imagine a focus group of 1,000 people. Sounds pretty chaotic, right? Not when you add AI into the equation.
Remesh is a tool that makes it easy to gather qualitative insights that shape your marketing strategy. Using Remesh, you can have a live conversation with up to 1,000 people at once, and its nifty platform sorts all of that incoming qualitative data for you into simple, easy to understand insights.
Check out our handy article if you’re unsure about the difference between qualitative and quantitative research.
Statista
Statista is a data visualization website that takes data from reputable reports across the web and makes them easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators just like you.
It helps you find even the most specific data relating to your industry. Are you planning on launching a new video game and want to know how many hours people spend playing video games? There’s a chart for that.
One neat aspect of using Statista is that the same chart is updated as the years pass. Say that you want to allude to the value of the beauty market in your proposal. If your investor accesses that same graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers, as Statista always finds the most recent research to update their visualizations. (Note that Statista doesn’t carry out original research.)
Pricing: Free; $39/month (billed yearly); $1,950 (one-time 30-day access)
Heartbeat Ai
The world of market research is constantly evolving, and thanks to digital innovation, market research tools are advancing all the time. Heartbeat Ai is no exception to this – its a ‘Human Experience’ software that uses machine learning to suss out the emotions underpinning written content.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth market research surveys that will help you understand your market and consumer preferences.
With this tool, you can create targeted, uber-specific surveys that help you collect answers that pertain specifically to your product. While using a data source can give you a general overview of your target audience and market, SurveyMonkey can help you get more granular insights from real consumers.
SurveyMonkey offers dedicated market research solutions and services, including a global survey panel, a survey translation service for international research, and a reporting dashboard option that allows you to easily parse through the results.
Pricing: Free, $32/month (Advantage Annual), $99/month (Premier Annual), $99/month (Standard Monthly); $25/user/month (Team Advantage, minimum 3 users), $75/user/month (Team Premier, minimum 3 users), Enterprise (Contact for pricing)
Heartbeat Ai
The world of market research is constantly evolving, and thanks to digital innovation, market research tools are advancing all the time. Heartbeat Ai is no exception to this – its a ‘Human Experience’ software that uses machine learning to suss out the emotions underpinning written content.
Heartbeat Ai believe that human emotion is a key facet of market research that often gets left out. As it says on their website: “At Heartbeat Ai, we’ve seen the power of unveiling the rich emotional world that word choice analysis conveys. We’re not talking binary indicators of approval. Instead, we generate far more nuanced, concrete insights about how people are triggered by what they experience.
Google Keyword Tool
(Free)
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
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
Upwave Instant Insights
Upwave Instant Insights is a consumer research tool that’s part of the Upwave brand marketing platform. While it isn’t advertised as a survey creation tool, it allows you to launch market research surveys specifically to get consumer insights.
Instant Insights allows you to target audiences on Upwave’s partner ecosystem and visualize the data for easy scanning by key stakeholders and investors. One pro of using this platform is that Upwave distributes your survey to real people — not just people taking surveys for the money, which could skew the results.
To create a survey, you sign up on the Upwave platform, click your name in the upper right-hand corner, and click “My Surveys,” where you can create as many surveys as you want. For the Basic option, you have a 6-question limit, while the Advanced option allows you to include unlimited questions.
Pricing: $2/study participant (Basic); $3/study participant (Extended); $4/study participant (Advanced)
Conclusion
Advertising research tools can be useful in many ways. By using them, you can monitor and even get feedback on your campaigns and ads, just to name a few.
All this data helps you get a sense of exactly what consumers are asking for, so that you can answer them.