Many people, especially start-ups and small businesses, don’t need accounting software to start with. Many such people prefer to try with one of the free trial versions available with most such software systems. While there are various market research websites which you can use for free, we will tell you about the best seven free market research websites.
If you’re a small business owner, then one of the most important tasks you need to do is market research. Market research can be expensive and time consuming if done by someone with little knowledge. In order to save your stomach from ulcers, why not attempt it yourself? You don’t have to spend thousands on market research. There are cheaper ways out there to get information from consumers about your products or services and I’ll show you one and that is using free market research websites.
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!
U.S. Census Data Tools
A vital part of marketing research is determining your market size, or the potential reach of your products or service. Research to see how many people you could reasonably expect to become your customers. For this type of research, there are the U.S. Census data tools. The site has more than a dozen online market research tools and free industry research reports that help you gain insight into demographics and geographic locations of populations who might be interested in your offerings.
Statista
For researching data and stats, Statista is another one of the best sites for market research. The site includes datasets on topics in over 600 industries. In addition to providing hard data, Statista also provides many supporting charts and infographics that make the data easy to consume, understand, and use in your market analysis.
SurveyMonkey
Getting information from people who match the criteria of your ideal customer is useful and so is gathering data from the people who actually do business with you. A part of your market research should include surveying your current customers to gain insight into their buying decision process and information that can help you create buyer personas. To perform this type of research, use SurveyMonkey to create surveys that you can distribute to your list of current customers.
Tableau Public
Tableau provides you with the tools and data to make your business run more smoothly. With a collaborative environment in which people can explore their own discoveries, Tableau offers insightful analytics that are powerful enough for both individuals and big organizations alike.
It’s Features:
Connectivity: TDE, Access, Excel, Text File (you can not connect Tableau Public to any of the databases)
• Distribution: Cloud (you can not save Tableau Public workbooks locally)
• Account Space: Each account holder will be able to save up to 10 gigabytes (GB) of content to Tableau Public
Pros:
- Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
- Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
- Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
Cons:
- The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is ‘public’ and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
- Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
- Limited connections – can’t connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)
Price: Free
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free, easy to use tool that helps you analyze traffic on your website. This system generates in-depth statistics about activity and can help paint the full picture of who visits your site and what they want.
Pros:
- Excellent detail on who visitors to a web site are (broken down to web browser, and how long they are on the site).
- Information on which pages within our client’s site are the most trafficked (including time spent on the page, and previous page).
- A breakdown of where traffic is coming from (from which domain, and even which page within the domain).
Cons:
- The sheer amount of data can be daunting to beginners.
- Organization of content could be made easier to handle.
- The mobile experience is lacking.
Price: Free
Conclusion
This article will help you to get on the fast track on researching. It will point out some sites where you can create a very thorough, professional assessment of a company without leaving home. These are the best free market research websites that I have reviewed and used myself over the years.