Have you been wondering how to save money by doing market research? It’s a common question among entrepreneurs, and for good reason. Market research can be expensive especially when it comes to polling and getting information from other sources. So, how do you save money on market research? You can take a look at a list of free tools for market research.
Awhile back, I wrote about How to Find Competitors’ Pricing. It was a very interesting post that generated some good feedback. A couple of people asked if I had some tools they could use to do their own market research. Over the years, I have acquired quite a few free tools for market research. Many are designed for pay-per-click or SEO research, but all of them are good for looking at the big picture on competitors in the same space.
Why are market research tools necessary?
Due to constant changes in the market, knowing what is essential to your audience can help you outsell your competitors and bring new customers to you. The right tool helps you in analyzing the market and growth of your business. So, let’s see why market research tools are vital.
- Spotting business opportunities easily
- Lowering your business risks
- Producing relevant materials
- Finding where to advertise
- Outperforming competitors
- Setting a higher goal for your business
- Easily making a decision
- Identifying customer requirements
- Improving selling techniques
Now, let’s move on to the main topic of this article.
10 best market research tools
Here, we have categorized the list of market research tools as follows.
Google Trends
Google Trends is one of the best free-market research tools which lets you look for specific keywords, subjects, and phrases that have been inquired over a particular period of time. The work is done by analyzing a portion of Google searches to calculate how many searches are done for the phrase entered in proportion to the total number of searches done on Google over the concurrent.
Features
- Real-time data
- Point out the latest trends
- Simple and easy UI
- Easy to navigate
Price
It’s a free tool
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.
Tableau Public
Tableau Public is a free data visualization tool that lets you figure out market research data with analytics and business intelligence. Using this mechanism, you will get complex data visualization simply and intuitively. Moreover, you can create an interactive and distributed dashboard that trends with colorful charts and tables. It connects to your files to obtain and proceed data into graphs.
Features
- Create interactive graphs and maps
- Build a dashboard in minutes
- Automated mobile layouts
- Automatically connect Tableau Public to Google Sheets
- Embedded visualization
- Highlight the analysis
Price
Tableau Public is free of cost. Prices vary if you switch to the Tableau Explorer, Tableau Viewer, or Tableau Creator.
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!
4 free market research resources
Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:
- Costs nothing, and
- Helps with the collection of customer-related information
The scope of “customer-related information” remains the same.
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.
Conclusion
Good market research tools are the key to your success in business. Not only do you need to thoroughly understand your own business, but also the game in general in order to bring unique and amazing ideas to the table. I’m not saying this will make or break your business, but it can make things a lot easier for you in the long run.