If you’re in business, marketing, or branding, you need to be aware of various marketing tactics to grow your online presence. That includes knowing about current tools at your disposal. The best way to accomplish this is by doing research online. But there are a lot of unrelated search results that show up when you type in relevant keywords. How can you get the vital information you want? You need to use research tools.
Research is an important part of any business. If you want to start a business soon, there are several research tools you should use for getting valuable market data. Research is also key when managing established companies. Below, you can find information about free audience research tools.
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.
Trendwatching
Trendwatching provides a similar service to Google Trends, however rather than allowing you to explore the data for yourself, it provides free publications on nearly any topic. The website provides reports on regional consumers, as well as uniquely tailored publications to tackle nearly any contemporary topic. There is a goldmine of free information provided in the reports and it can be used to further understand the market you are operating in, or even form the basis of a forward thinking strategy.
One report in particular that we would recommend to anybody looking to understand general consumer trends and how they are changing is the 10 Trends for 2015. This highlights ten important opportunities for innovation that businesses can make use of and integrate into their current strategies.
Think with Google
Think with Google is similar in concept to Trendwatching. It archives a huge amount of free reports and publications on a range of consumer issues. You are able to search reports by either industry or platform, giving you greater control over the data you are researching.
One additional feature that has sparked a significant amount of interest is the Creative Sandbox. This is a showcase of innovative ideas that different companies are using to target and advertise to various consumers. Once again, you are able to browse this by industry or platform. The Creative Sandbox really is at the cutting edge of technology and is a fantastic source of creative inspiration, as well as technical information.
Omgili
Omgili is a simple tool, but one that is great for monitoring consumer opinion of your brand, product or service. The purpose of this tool is to search a huge list of discussion forums and message boards for any specified keyword. Searching the name of your brand (or even competitor’s brand) gives you the ability to effectively measure brand sentiment. By combining this tool with some basic analytics, it becomes very easy to measure the public favourability towards your brand in addition to how content is filtering through the internet.
Spezify
Spezify is similar in concept to Omgili. It is a simple search engine that makes the measurement of brand sentiment and web presence an easy process. However, rather than searching message boards and forums, Spezify searches online social media. The result is a mood board style results page that provides links to pictures with your keyword in the anchor text. Pictures are collated from a wide range of sources including Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, eBay and more.
Combining the results from Omgili and Spezify can provide a fantastic overview of brand presence. In a digital age where dyadic conversations between business and the consumer are becoming a thing of the past, regaining control and being able to understand consumer interaction with your brand is a powerful tool and can help shape future brand strategies.
YouGov Profiles
The YouGov profiler is one of our favourite entries to this list. It seems, at first glance, similar to Google Trends. However, the insights it can provide are much more detailed and targeted at your specific audience. Start by searching an existing brand, personality or object. YouGov will then spend a few moments building you an aggregated profile of the average consumer based on your search. The kind of information provided ranges from basic demographic to personality and lifestyle factors. You can even discover what other brands are popular with the average consumer, and what media they consume.
To make the most effective use of this research tool, we would suggest either researching your own brand and analysing whether the results match your expectations, or researching competitors to identify gaps in the market that can easily be filled.
Consumer Barometer
The Consumer Barometer is our third entry on this list from Google: the masters of free, accessible data. The aim of this service is to help you understand consumers’ internet usage habits across the world. There are two distinctly different ways to use this tool. The first is to explore the key findings from the research. Provided in animated infographic format, this sums up the key trends & statistics that will help you understand consumers’ internet usage habits.
The second way of using this tool is the Graph Builder. This is a powerful tool that allows you to access the full data from the report. Broken down into country grouping, you are able to explore how consumers interact online and build these findings into your own research.
Statista
While in many aspects Statista are paid services, there is also a lot of data sources that you are able to access for free. Simply enter your search terms on the homepage and browse the numerous reports on offer. This tool is fantastic for researching industries and understanding the nature of the competition. Free information includes the relative size of an industry, average expenditures, and even individual company expenditures.
Alexa
Alexa is another great tool for researching a competitive market; however the information provided generally refers to a company’s web presence rather than necessarily its performance as a whole. This tool can be used to either research the position of your own web presence, or that of your key competitors. You can also see in what aspects you outrank your competitors and vice versa, which can form the basis for target and goal setting activities.
Some of the information provided by Alexa includes: audience demographics, geographic breakdowns, web traffic analysis and related sites. It is worth noting however that not all websites will be able to access Alexa’s data depending on their size, so when conducting your research, try to focus on your larger and more prominent competitors.
FlexMR Platform Demo
For more detailed online consumer research, you can book a free trial of our unique FlexMR software. We offer a dedicated platform that is capable of hosting both qual and quant research simultaneously for even greater results. Our flexible tools and service levels mean that you can mix and match tools to suit your exact needs and pay only for what you need. This system is capable of accommodating any type of research community, panel or ad hoc activity with online research tools spanning the entire qual and quant spectrum, social and mobile integration and available in over 60 languages.
Our clients have enjoyed the benefits of easily being able to add extra tools to the platform in a quick and effective manner, as well as generating rich insights that have helped build business strategies, competitive market analyses and more.
What are your preferred online research tools? There is a huge amount of free data available online and we know we have only just scratched the surface with this list, so let us know what tools you would recommend in the comments below.
Amazon.
Amazon is marketing gold for reading your target audience’s minds, because almost your entire market buys from Amazon, and because they’re actively reviewing their purchases and providing detailed feedback.
Start by searching popular book titles in your industry. For example, in the personal finance industry, you might search Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.
Then, sort by “critical reviews”.
Amazon reviewers can be very detailed, so you’ll get insight into the language they use, the gaps in the book, and the information they need.
In this detailed review of Total Money Makeover, for example, the reviewer says:
“…You need to impose self-discipline to break bad-spending habits. His methods require almost crash-financial-diet measures (such as taking on extra jobs, ceasing any and all unnecessary spending to the point of maybe not having much fun, selling your possessions, etc.), but if you can stick to it, it will probably yield results.”
If you served this audience, how powerful could it be to provide them with the exact, step-by-step strategies that actually work to build up self-discipline and stick to financial goals?
As frustrating as Facebook can be for marketers, it’s difficult to argue that Facebook has a reach that few other social platforms have.
Almost everyone you know uses Facebook, which is why Facebook is mind-reading gold.
But don’t just stick to Facebook pages or profiles. Facebook groups are where the action happens.
Facebook groups are gathering places for people who are interested in a specific topic, and if you focus on targeted groups, you can eavesdrop on your audience’s conversations so you can create content to provide massive value.
For example, if you taught photography for beginners, you could search photography in the search bar and sort by groups:
This will lead you right to the water; this is marketing gold, a place where thousands of your target audience is congregating. In this case, over 10,000 members!
When your membership is approved, start combing through the posts and taking note of the language your target audience uses and the types of questions they ask:
You can create content to help them exactly where they are.
Conclusion
Market research is a boon for all types of business. However, doing market research is an arduous task. It makes it challenging for small businesses to base their decisions on accurate, timely data. But what many businesspersons don’t know is that there are amazing free online tools which make the process of market research much faster and easier.