There are many types of free market research tools including consumer surveys, consumer reviews, expert opinions, industry reports, infographics, press releases, social media insights, and user generated content. Market research helps businesses to understand their competitors better.
There are many market research tools available for free online to help with researching a business idea. They provide helpful information for people who are starting their own businesses. This article highlights market research tools that can be used in areas such as researching competitors, pricing your products or services, estimating expenses, conducting customer surveys, researching what customers are searching for on the internet, website traffic stats, online consumer trends, and much more.
Google Trends
If you want to get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions — Google Trends is an excellent tool.
All you need to do is enter a search query and toggle with the filters. As an example, take a look at the level of interest in “office supplies” in the U.S. over the past five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest peaked in February 2020 — at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Plus, you can explore variations in interest across the 50 states, as well as related topics and queries that are surging in popularity:
The “interest by subregion” data is powerful. In Wyoming, searches for “office supplies” account for a greater percentage of all search queries than in any other state. Your average resident of Wyoming, in other words, is more interested in searching for office supplies than is your average resident of, say, Louisiana — a valuable insight for anyone who sells office supplies online.
Equally valuable is the insight that searches for “where to buy office supplies in bulk” are on the rise — potentially indicative of an emerging pain point.
Make My Persona
As you collect and analyze customer-related information, it’s a good idea to create or tweak your buyer personas: detailed profiles of the semi-fictional people for whom your product or service is designed. In the context of market research, personas are useful because they help you synthesize and comprehend the information you’re gathering.
Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, you can use a wonderful free tool called Make My Persona.
Intuitive and fun, Make My Persona is a seven-step process that walks you through the essential components of your target customer: demographic information, firmographic information, job title, pain points, and so on. And if you want to go beyond the bare essentials, you can add as many extra sections of information as you like.
Important note: Your personas should be dynamic. As you conduct further market research and learn more about your target customers, your personas should evolve accordingly.
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.
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.
As an example, let’s say you’re developing a product or service that targets new homeowners. If you were to click on the Homeownership topic, you’d land on a list of reports like this one:
If I were you, that’s not a report I’d want to overlook!
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.
Google Analytics
Though Google Analytics is not a broader tool for providing market research entirely, it can give feedback on how your customers are behaving when they are on your website. It will show you which of your products have more views and fewer sales, or which social media channel is getting more responses from your clients. In a nutshell, Google Analytics helps you to analyze the traffic on your website and give you a complete picture of your visitors and their requisitions.
Features
- Reporting traffic
- Tracking conversion
- Keyword guidance
- Reference of third-parties
- Custom dashboard
Price
If you are a small business that wants to avoid paying monthly fees, you can use their free service. If you want to use a vast amount of features, you can buy the Google Analytics 360 that will cost $150,000 in a year.
SiteProfiler
SiteProfiler is the tool for anyone who wants to know about their competitors’ websites in one place. By just entering a URL and clicking on “Go,” SiteProfiler will show you all of your competitor’s website statistics, including traffic information, keyword analysis data, social media demographics, and popularity ranking.
Its Features:
- Overview – shows all aggregated data about a certain domain from Domain Authority, Page Authority, Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Alexa Rank and more.
- Backlinks – shows you all backlinks directed to a site with top referring domains and anchor texts.
- Top Trending Content – shows you all of the top content the site have generated with a breakdown of where is their traffic coming from
- Audience – this tool breaks down this website audience by age, gender, location, interests and more.
- Competitors – shows you the competitive landscape of this website, with relevant keywords or subjects that might be competing with this website.
Pros:
- Data visualization: a lot of useful statistics and charts that are presented beautifully on the screen.
- Get access to insights on any website or niche through a url or a keyword
- SiteProfiler also has a Google Chrome extension. This extension allows you to find helpful information about any site while browsing.
Cons:
- The biggest drawback to the SiteProfiler is that you can’t export to Google Sheets directly
- Almost none
Price: Free. Pro starts from $29.90/mo
Moody’s Analytics
Moody’s Analytics provides a home for capital markets and risk management professionals to find tools that offer unique insight into the marketplace. With decades of experience in areas such as credit analysis, economic research, and financial risk management, this company is an invaluable resource for any individual looking to make sense of their market or position themselves correctly within it.
Moody’s Actuarial Services helps individuals with understanding risky investments by providing them with information on how they could invest better next time around. Their services include advice on managing debt obligations through detailed reports outlining trends in borrowing levels over periods like 5-years and 10 years respectively; insights into various economies via Forecasts from Moody’s Global Macroeconomic Service (GMS) which are available quarterly
Price: Free
Conclusion
Market research is a very important part of business today, as it is the best way that a company can determine what will be successful. This is because there are different needs from consumers from one region to another, from one age group to the next, and from one time of year to another.