Best market research tools future is something that excites us more than anything. There are so many possibilities to do effective marketing in the online world. The key feature of each tool is to get you some accurate data on your competitor. Precise information on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors will help you understand what you may need to do more to stay on top of search engine results. Once you have an idea about what your competitors are doing, it’s easier for you to adapt them or do something different from them.
Market research is the heart and soul of any successful product/service launch. Most humans are habitual creatures, and we like to stick with what we know. As a result, getting someone to switch to a new product or service takes proper research by marketers.
Thankfully today, market research isn’t as challenging as it used to be in the days of door-to-door surveys. Now you can take advantage of online tools and get the job done efficiently.
There are multiple disciplines (and tools) when it comes to market research. There’s:
- Survey software
- SEO tools
- Data visualization tools
- And a lot more.
Social media surveys and real-time analytics can do more to help your market research than all of the offline surveys in the world.
Market research. It’s a crucial element of business success – and in a world with more and more competition for brands, understanding the ins and outs of your target market is more important than ever. Luckily, it’s easier than ever before to get valuable insights, and thanks to the advent of market research tools, you no longer need to be an insights-whizz to start getting the data you need.
Attest may be an obvious choice for market research surveys, but there are plenty of other market research tools and competitor tracking tools that will help you on your quest for data, and we’ve pulled out the best of the best below.
Fancy diving straight into the insights? Sign up for Attest and start answering your market research questions in real-time:
Market research tool #1: Attest
Send your first market research survey for free to a built-in audience. No credit card required.
Attest helps marketers access brand and market insights at lightning speed. That’s why we truly believe we’re the best market research tool in the biz.
Attest’s platform lets you do all kinds of market research – from hefty pieces of work – like market and competitor analysis – to in-the-moment gut checks, like testing different creatives for ads. Build surveys, connect to our audience of over 100M consumers worldwide, and start getting the answers you need in real-time.
Using the built-in audience makes it quick & easy to find the information you need from your target market. What they think, which brands they know & trust, and their buying habits.
We’re loved by the likes of Gymshark, Santander, and Transferwise as an unbeatable market research tool. Fancy giving it a try? Sign up for free and start drafting surveys in minutes. No credit card required.Get started for free
Market research tool #2: Google Trends
In the same realm as Answer the Public is Google Trends, which surfaces trends data from all over the internet. You can refine by the location you’re most interested in, or go worldwide.
When you enter a term into Google Trends, it shows you how that term has been trending over time, and assigns it a score out of 100. You can also compare different terms to see how they hold up against each other.
As an example, let’s say we enter ‘Christmas’ as the search term. We’re presented with a graph that clearly shows that it hits peak trendiness in December, for obvious reasons, and then trends very low for the rest of the year. And now, as I write this in October 2020, it’s beginning the upward trend again – a sign that perhaps people are willing Christmas to come early.
Market research tool #3: 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.
Market research tool #4: 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.
Market research tool #5: 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.”
Market research tool #6: Answer the Public
“There are 3 billion Google searches every day,” the Answer the Public homepage reads, “and 20% of those have never been seen before.”
That’s a whole lot of insight into exactly what your consumers are thinking, if you know how to access it.
With Answer the Public, you input a search query – let’s say ‘market research’ for example – and get back every useful phrase and question that people have asked around that topic, all neatly organised so you can quickly make sense of the data. The simple term ‘market research’ becomes everything from ‘how can market research inform product development’ to ‘when market research goes wrong’.
What’s the point of this? All this data helps you get a sense of exactly what consumers are asking for, so that you can answer them.
Why Do You Need to Use Market Research Tools?
Market research is the process of understanding your customer’s behavior, preferences, and industry as a whole.
Market research tools simplify this process and make it easy to understand your target market, refine your marketing strategy, and gather helpful customer feedback.
By doing market research, you give your business a better chance at success. When you deeply understand your customers and market, you can create better content, products, and better serve your customers.
Using a market research tool can help streamline your workflow and help give you additional insights:
- Uncover gaps in the market and launch new products and services
- Understand market trends, so you can be the first business in new niches
- Create more compelling content and website copy to turn visitors into customers
- Study your competition to see what they’re doing well, and where you can improve
- Use data to better serve your customers, so they stay with you over the long-term
With that said, let’s take a look at some of the best market research tools you can use along with your WordPress website.
1. WPForms
WPForms is the best WordPress survey form plugin and contact form plugin in the market used by over 4 million websites.
It’s very beginner friendly and lets you build out online surveys, polls, questionnaires, and user feedback forms simply with the drag and drop builder.
You can also use one of the 100+ pre-built templates to quickly create the exact form you need.
The powerful survey and polls addon lets you easily create engaging survey forms to collect customer and market data.
You can combine this addon with other useful features like conditional logic, multi-page forms, and even conversational forms to make your forms feel more human.
You can add all kinds of survey form fields, like checkboxes, radio buttons, net promoter score (NPS) field, ratings, and more.
Best of all, WPForms automatically creates beautiful reports with graphs and charts to help you better understand your data. You can also export these graphs as images to share on social media or embed them into your website.
For more details, see our guide on how to create a survey in WordPress with beautiful reports.
The free version of WPForms lets you simply create contact forms in WordPress, but if you want to create advanced surveys and more, then you’ll need a premium plan that currently starts at $199 per year.
2. Think with Google Research
Think with Google Research is a collection of tools that will help you understand your market, uncover new trends, and gain valuable insights to give you an advantage.
This group of tools offers high-level insights into your market, useful statistics, and other marketing tools to put your insights to work.
For example, there’s a Market Insights tool that can help you find new regional and global markets.
You’ll also find a Rising Retail Categories tool that will show you trending eCommerce categories, like Google Trends for eCommerce.
You can filter this data by different countries and view it on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
For those who edit videos, or have a YouTube channel, you can use the Find My Audience Tool to uncover new audiences on YouTube and learn how you can easily reach them.
3. Semrush
Semrush is the best keyword research tool and content marketing research tool in the market. It’s used by everyone from SEO professionals to beginner bloggers.
Note: we use Semrush here at WPBeginner for a lot of SEO and content tasks like tracking keyword rankings and keyword research.
You can use the keyword research features to see how many people search for a given keyword and if it’s growing in popularity or becoming less popular.
If you’re using Google Analytics, then you can also use that to get additional insights about your website visitors.
It also provides in-depth data on other relevant and popular search terms, your competitor’s search engine ranking positions, and a lot more.
To get a big picture view of your market and competitors, you can use the competitive research toolkit to see your competitor’s traffic, authority sites, up and coming websites, and more.
If you want access to detailed content and keyword research data, then the pricing for premium plans starts at $119.95 per month and gives you full access to keyword, SEO, and traffic data.
Deal: our readers can get an extended 30-day free trial by using our Semrush coupon code.
4. Statista
Statista is a data research platform that provides easy to digest data across multiple industries and niches.
The reports, graphs, and data are continually updated with the most recent information, so you’ll never be viewing data that’s out of date.
The data this tool provides is very specific. No matter how niche your industry you’ll be able to access valuable data you can use to create buyer personas, unique content, and more.
Plus, the same chart is updated as new data becomes available. So, you can continue to view the same graph and see how market data changes as time goes on.
This tool provides a ton of free data, while the more niche reports and data are only available on premium plas that start at $39 per month when billed yearly.
5. BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo is a great content research and market insight tool used by brands like Hubspot, Buzzfeed, and more. It lets marketers take a deep dive into what content is the most popular in certain niches.
When you’re creating a new article for your WordPress blog you want it to be successful. A great way to do this is to see what content your audience already loves and create something similar.
Buzzsumo lets you dig deep into the top performing articles across the web, so you can see what gets the most social shares and the types of content that are the most popular.
You also get access to data from the past 5 years, so you can see which topics are trending.
It can also help you find influencers in your space and uncover keyword opportunities you might have missed.
Buzzsumo has a free forever plan that gives you 10 free searches per month. If you want access to unlimited searches and more tools, then pro plans start at $99 per month.
6. US Census Bureau
The US Census Bureau has a free resource that lets you search all US census data.
This can provide you with a lot of useful demographic information. You can filter your searches by income, age, year, and location.
There are also built-in data visualization tools so that you can see the size of potential markets across the US.
If you’re looking to expand your business into different areas across the US, then you can see where your industry is already oversaturated and where there are still gaps in the market.
7. NielsenIQ
NielsenIQ offers retail and consumer insights to help grow your business. If you’re considering launching a new product line, then the data and insights here will help you launch more effectively.
You get access to product forecast metrics which will help to predict how well your products will sell when you launch. It will also help you determine the right channels to distribute your products.
If you don’t have a lot of customer data to work with, then you can run a market research survey to NeilsenIQ’s list of partners.
However, NielsenIQ is a more expensive solution, so businesses with a smaller budget will want to try different business intelligence solutions on this list first.
8. Gartner
Gartner provides incredibly accurate and detailed industry reports that experts create. One of the most popular offerings is Magic Quadrant, which helps you identify industry trends, gaps in the market, and much more.
There are various other reports too, like the Critical Capabilities report that compares competing products and services against each other.
The goal of the reports is to help make your business decision making much easier.
You’ll also find data analysis and visualization tools to give you a big-picture understanding of your market. Plus, in-depth research reports to help you stay ahead of your competition.
9. Tableau Public
Tableau Public is a free data visualization tool. This tool can help you make sense of the complex data you’ve gathered and better understand your market.
You can import data from a ton of different sources including, excel spreadsheets, PDFs, text, and more. The tool will then analyze the data and present the data in an interactive dashboard.
Here you can customize the data with colorful tables and charts.
Since it’s a free public platform, you can share this data with your team across mobile, desktop, and even email.
10. Upwave
Upwave (formerly Survata) is a market research and analytics platform to help measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
It lets you easily visualize your marketing data in real-time, so you can see what areas of your marketing are the most successful.
Upwave includes predictive analysis to help forecast the success of your campaigns and let you make changes on the fly.
Beyond gathering data for your current campaigns, they offer a platform called Instant Insights by PureSpectrum. This lets you launch your own customer study to gather valuable respondent data.
Your unique data is updated in real-time and presented in an easy to understand graph format.
11. Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center is a nonprofit that provides in-depth and accurate data across a wide range of industries.
The research and in-depth reports cover industries like social trends, science, technology and the internet, global interests, social media, online privacy, and much more.
Each report also includes graphs and a demographic breakdown of each industry, like this one on social media use for US adults.
Included with each report is a detailed breakdown of how they conduct their studies, which can help you understand how the data can apply to your business.
All of this information will help you find new opportunities to expand and better understand your market.
12. LivingFacts
LivingFacts is created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the same company behind The Pew Research Center.
The focus of this data is on Americans and how they live. If you have a website with a US audience, then this website will help you understand current demographic trends.
For example, you’ll find research covering US demographics, faith and religion, overall health, money and work, and upcoming trends.
Best of all, the data is presented in an easy to read format filled with statistics, infographics, and fun facts.
13. Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder and best WordPress calculator plugin in the market. It helps you build complex form solutions quickly.
One great feature is the ability to create custom calculators. When most people think of a calculator, they think of math class or an app on their phone.
However, Formidable Forms lets you create unique calculators that can provide you with all kinds of unique data about your audience.
For example, you can create mortgage calculators, request a quote calculators, car payment calculators, and much more.
These calculators are not only a great way to get backlinks and get more traffic but can be a very useful source of data you can use to improve your website and business.
You can also format, filter, and display your user-submitted data on the front end of your website.
To get access to the powerful calculator features, you need to purchase the Business plan that’s currently $199.50 per month.
14. Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is a tool that gives you access to data about your Facebook page and Facebook as a whole.
As the largest social media network in the world with nearly 2.5 million monthly active users, this data can be very useful to your brand.
It gives you information like age, gender, job title, hobbies, location, relationship status, and more.
This data will help you deeply understand your target audience and find new ways to expand your audience across Facebook.
Conclusion
Picking the right market research tools is important if you want to grow your business. But how do you know which are the best market research tools? Which are the niftiest bits of kit that fit into your marketing strategy? How to find the relevant insights that will help your business grow? With so many tools to pick from, it can be hard to know where to start.