Best Marketing Research Tools has to be used by all the marketers. It is not necessary that you always find all the information that you’re looking for, but you should be able to find the info that is accurate. Best Marketing research tools are not included within your marketing plan if your mind isn’t focused on them. every business may face every type of problem, which they face all over the world. But , someday they will be solved if our efforts are focused on them.
Qualtrics
Outstanding feature(s): Noteworthy reporting features and great questionnaire design. A1 customer service team.
First on our list of market research tools is a suggestion by Jay Qureshi from Chicago Food Policy Action Council. Qureshi shares, “For primary market research, I’d have to go with Qualtrics. The questionnaire design features are much more advanced compared to other survey tools out there and the reporting features allow you to set elaborate rules to filter and customize the results the way you want.”
Related: Marketing Reporting: The KPIs, Reports, & Dashboard Templates You Need to Get Started
To top this up, the team behind Qualtrics also offers excellent customer service. “Their team handles the incentivization process of the respondents (whenever necessary) for us and are quick to respond to specific requests,” Qureshi writes.
Google Analytics
Outstanding feature(s): Records real-time audience insights.
A handful of experts recommend Google Analytics for market research, particularly, for understanding where your visitors come from and how they interact with your business (your site visitors’ on-site behavior).
Truck Driver Institute’s Keyoka Kinzy applauds the Audience section feature. Kinzy explains, “It allows you to adjust the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your specific audience to ensure that you’re optimizing the content that appeals to your consumer base.”
“As such,” Paul Franklin of SideGains summarizes, “GA helps me understand the direction my content should take long-term and informs my short-terms strategy to serve people more of the content they find interesting.”
Editor’s note: See all your Google Analytics metrics such as sessions, sessions by channel, bounce rate, and more on one screen using this free Google Analytics Website Engagement Dashboard Template.
Google Trends
Outstanding feature(s): In-depth look at market trends.
“Google Trends has been most insightful for me,” Dollar Creed’s Lily Ugbaja highlights. “This is because it is a great tool for researching trends.”
In particular, Ugbaja writes that this tool:
- “Gives a picture of what people are looking for on the web, by tracking the volume of searches on a particular product or services over time and by location.
- Gives insight into similar search queries and topics, to identify patterns and figure out the terminology users commonly use.”
Related: 19 Ways For Using Google Trends to Build Your Content Marketing Strategy
Typeform
Outstanding feature(s): Easy to use and great data visualization.
An important aspect of marketing research is getting to know your audience and their problem. To this end, talking to them helps, which brings us to the survey tool, Typeform.
Ashley Cummings from Searchlight Content notes it’s great for all businesses irrespective of their size. Talking about her work, Cummings elaborates, “My business is smaller, but I still conduct primary research regularly.
I recently used Typeform to send out a survey to freelance writers that helps other writers benchmark rates. Typeform was perfect for my needs. It was easy to create and distribute a survey.”
Best of all, Cummings shares, “my participants were familiar with the platform, so it wasn’t difficult for them to complete the survey.:
“Typeform also visualizes the data, making it easy to interpret,” Cummings adds. “Typeform also allows open-ended responses for qualitative data, which was helpful for me on questions where I wanted deeper answers.”
SEMrush
Outstanding feature(s): Quick overview of competitors’ position and marketing spend.
This one’s another popular market research tool among the 60 marketers we talked to.
The team at All Phase Media, for example, uses SEMrush to identify marketing trends based on how keywords are used in their market. In Mike Errico’s words, “Our team uses SEMRush which allows us to identify trends in keyword usage across any vertical or niche market.
If we see a trend for a keyword relative to our company, or our clients, we can quickly create content and compete for that keyword.”
Similarly, Beth Cooper of KNB Communications shares, “SEMRush has been super helpful in gaining insight for our business. Everyone is online, so pulling market data by analyzing web traffic around domains and keywords makes a lot of sense.
We are also able to see digital ads domains are running and how much people are spending on marketing. It helps us benchmark our own success, set goals, and refine our marketing tactics and messaging.”
Ahrefs
Outstanding feature(s): Insights on competitor ranking.
“Ahrefs is a compulsory tool if you want to research any market,” insists One Doctor’s Omiete Charles-Davies. So what exactly does Ahrefs offer? Charles-Davies answers:
- “They provide search engine data across the top industry players, giving you strategic insight into what your target market is looking for online and will help you adjust what your product offers.
- They also offer you data about how well your competitors perform on search engines and can uncover hidden keywords that your target audience is using to find services in your industry.”
And here’s how the team at One Doctor uses this data: “For instance, their data shows that more people are looking for dermatologists online than primary care physicians. This useful information helped us to target dermatologists for our health-tech products before targeting primary care physicians,” Charles-Davies outlines.
What’s more, Ahrefs helps monitor backlinks. Consequently, you can get an overview of where your competitors’ link profile.
Related: 30 Free Link Building Tips for Building Links On Little-to-No Budget
Vital Feedz’ Rohan Kadam adds to this: “Filters like ‘Keyword Difficulty’ and ‘Volume’ help me narrow my overall keyword bucket and helps me choose right keywords for my content.”
Plus, the “Content Gap tool of Ahrefs allows me to identify key organic keywords for which my competitors are ranking. This helps me plan for future content pieces that I can publish in order to outrank my competitors,” Kadam shares.
Editor’s note: Keep tabs on your link profile by tracking your visits by source, incoming internal links, and more on this free Link Analysis Dashboard template.
SimilarWeb
Outstanding feature(s): Quick overview of competitors’ online presence.
Next up, we’ve SimilarWeb among the best market research tools to try. Essentially, it gives you details on your competitors’ website traffic, referral sources, demographics, and more.
No wonder, SoftwarePundit’s Bruce Hogan goes on to say, “SimilarWeb is the most insightful market research tool that we’ve used.”
Hogan suggests, “It has the most complete data on internet browsing patterns for all websites. This includes traffic from all channels, by geography & device, and useful metrics like visit duration.”
LeadQuizzes
Outstanding feature(s): Great data visualization.
“Using quizzes and highly visual surveys allows us to segment audiences into different customer groups based on the responses they give,” comments Alexandra Zelenko from DDI Development.
“Based on the data obtained, our team managed to create a particular marketing strategy and reach each of the groups based on their personal characteristics and preferences.”
Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center has copious data on social trends, technology usage, science and many other current topics. Register and you can get access to datasets and reports with excellent charts. Pew does a great job explaining the methodology behind its studies, with good demographic breakdowns helpful to marketing teams. Pew data can help you identify new opportunities and understand your target market.
Price: Free
Living Facts
Living Facts is a sister site to the Pew Research Center that can provide information to help you market to potential customers. The site says it “is about Americans today — who we are and how we live.” The site has colorful image infographics, videos, and quizzes and is easy to use. Get a snapshot of consumer trends, demographics, faith, health, work and other topics about American life for your marketing plan or campaign.
Price: Free
3. U.S. Census Business Data
The U.S. Census is a top market research tool. Census Business Builder is a source for conducting market research targeting a single geography. Explore Census Data is helpful for segmenting customers by demographics. The U.S. Census Bureau also provides Data Gems, a collection of videos to better explain how to access census data for your business. Other tools for market research from the U.S. government include:
- Economic indicators: See the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis for additional economic figures.
- Income statistics: Find market rates of pay and similar data. Earnings by Occupation and Education and Income Statistics.
- Money statistics: Find Money Statistics from the Federal Reserve Banks.
- NAICS Codes: Look up industries by the North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.
- Employment statistics: See various Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Price: Free
Survey Monkey
To poll people for information or gather customer feedback, one of your best bets is conducting surveys. Survey Monkey is one of the most well-known tools. It’s been around since 1999 and the product is mature and robust. The Basic plan is available at no charge, providing you 10 questions per survey, with up to 40 responses per survey. If you need more, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
Price: Free and Paid Plans from $32 / month
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Zoho Survey
Zoho Survey is a relative newcomer to the survey software industry, but has quickly ramped up to match rivals. Zoho Survey has a free version which allows you to do 10 questions and receive up to 100 responses, per survey. Zoho has over 250 professional templates. You may need a paid version to give you the flexibility and features you need. Added plus: a full version of Zoho Survey is included at no additional charge in Zoho One subscriptions.
Price: Free and Paid Plans from $20 / month.
Keyword Surfer
The Keyword Surfer Extension from Surfer SEO is a great tool for content marketing. You install this cool tool on your Chrome browser, and then when you search in Google you can see the volume of monthly searches for various keywords. The information is right there — no need to do keyword research using another tool. Keyword Surfer helps you see what terms your target audience might be searching for, so you can tailor your website pages to meet the expectations of customers.
Price: Freehttps://05040e2567317aec2154046a95f52da8.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
7. SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO (search engine optimization) tool. There are many SEO tools, but SEMRush is popular with marketers and content creators, not just SEO professionals. Its Keyword Magic tool is a powerful way to analyze a broad topic and identify niche subtopics. This helps you analyze your online presence. You can also do a gap analysis showing what keywords your main competitors are getting search rankings for and how you compare. SEMrush is a bit pricey, but extremely helpful for researching your digital presence.
Price: Starts at $99.95 / month
Google Trends
Google Trends gives a picture of what people are searching for on the web. It’s one of the best tools to research market trends, and track the volume of searches on products or services over time and by geographic location. You can also gain insight into related topics and related search queries, to spot patterns and identify the terminology the user is most likely to use.
Price: Freehttps://05040e2567317aec2154046a95f52da8.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Hootsuite
Social media is another important place to do marketing research. Hootsuite has a reputation as a social scheduling tool. But the tool also functions as a way to track social mention activity of your brand and various search terms on channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The free plan is very limited with 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages. Most small businesses and marketers serious about social media will need a paid plan.
Price: Starts at $29 / month
Facebook Audience Insights
If you use Facebook for marketing purposes, Facebook Audience Insights is one of the best market research tools. Use it to track engagement with your content. You can learn about the demographics and behaviors of your social media fans, or those of any other Facebook page by using. Insights gives you a run down of the page views on your Facebook page, post reach, page likes, actions taken on the page and more. You can also use the “Pages to Watch” feature to identify and compare your page’s performance with others in a similar niche.
Price: Free
Twitonomy
If you want a tool to track your social mention and engagement activity specifically on Twitter, try Twitonomy. You can also research activity involving other users and hashtags. You simply sign in for the basic service for free through connecting your Twitter account. Of course, Twitter also provides analytics tools for your own account. So if you don’t want to authorize another app, you can always try Twitter Analytics for social media research.
Price: Free and Paid Plans starting at $20 / month
Job Report Sites
Need to track small business hiring and employment? Two tools are helpful for market research by brands offering employment related products and services.
- Paychex Small Business Employment Watch is a monthly report of job and wage data covering businesses with fewer than 50 workers. The reports break down the data by region, state, metro area and industry. The Paychex report can also be used by small businesses to benchmark worker earnings and hours by industry.
- ADP Employment Report offers a national employment report on changes in all U.S. non-farm private sector employment. ADP breaks out specific monthly reports on small business employment and franchise employment, by industry.
Price: Free
NFIB Economic Trends
Each month, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) issues the Small Business Economic Trends report. The report identifies trends and plans for spending by small businesses. The Small Business Optimism Index is part of the report and measures owner optimism. So it can be a great resource of market research for B2B companies that sell to small businesses. Small business owners can use it to gain a sense of how their peers are thinking.
Price: Free
Yelp
You may think of Yelp as the place to visit for reviews about your own business. But it can also be one your top tools to research competitors. Find out what other customers like about your competitors — for example, to identify products or services you might want to add to your lineup. And just as importantly, find out what customers do not like about your competitors and make changes to avoid similar problems.
Price: Free
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is the key review site for the tourism industry. If your small business is a tourist destination, this is the site for tracking reviews of your own business. You also can do market research on competitors. You can also research similar businesses similar to yours even in other cities and even other countries. Study these reviews to figure out elements you could add to please customers who are attracted to businesses similar to yours. Or, if your business is connected to the hospitality industry, use this site to conduct market research about what’s important to people in destinations and travel, or identify potential partners who cater to an audience similar to yours.
Price: Free
Software Review Sites
If you’re launching or produce a software product or service, there are a number of sites that host reviews about competitors.
- Capterra probably features the broadest array of software categories across industries.
- G2 emphasizes that its reviews are always verified.
- TrustRadius returns vendor listings, reviews and comparisons with other software on software searches.
It’s a great idea to look at what people are saying about your competitors — not just about what customers are saying about you. You’ll get the widest range of opinions by checking all the websites. Vendors can pay for premium services, but you don’t need that to do basic market research.
Price: Free
Export Information
To take advantage of export opportunities for your small business, see Export Solutions from the International Trade Association. Sections include information on learning how to export, researching foreign markets, finding potential customers and partners and more.
Price: Free
International Franchise Association
For small business owners who operate a franchise — or small businesses serving franchise owners — the International Franchise Association maintains a Franchise Industry Research section. Use this tool to do market research on different aspects of the franchise industry.
Price: Free
National Retail Federation
For research on the retail industry, the National Retail Federation is excellent. The Research section includes a monthly economic review with a consumer confidence index. The NRF also has a section called Retail’s Impact with retail stats broken down by state.
Price: Free
Small Business Statistics
The Small Business Statistics center of Small Business Trends is an essential resource to understand smaller enterprises. It has statistics on the number of small business broken down by state. It also includes information on the percentage of businesses that are small, how many people they employ, the average number of people in a small business, and statistics by industries and demographics.
Price: Free
Pick FU
Need to get fast feedback on a new product name or some marketing copy? Then PickFu is for you. PickFu says it matches you with U.S.-based consumers who share valuable feedback on your business ideas, product photos, marketing copy and more. PickFU does not have a free version, but it allows you to poll an audience by either asking for their opinion about something, or by asking them to vote for their favorite option. There are also many different demographic variables you can select, so you can reach almost any target consumer audience that is a match for your product or service.
Price: Starts at $50
Tools Conclusion
We hope you find this list of market research tools helpful. It has never been easier to conduct competitive intelligence or collect market research. As you can see, today much of it can be done online.
Conclusion
market research tools make it easy for you to understand your audience, what they’re searching for, and their preferences. You also get a good overview of your competitors’ marketing strategy. So what are you waiting for? Start with any of these tools today.