If you’ve been in the business for a while, this is a full circle moment. Market segmentation software has come full circle. Once free downloadable tools have become the norm and there are many options to choose from.
When searching for the right software package, you want to determine your market. Your market includes the businesses already present in the market, along with possible new entrants. Different businesses require different kinds of accounting software free download full version for windows 10. And this is why it is important to determine which market segment represents your ideal customer before choosing to purchase accounting software program.
Google Books NGram ViewerA very useful and fascinating tool that analyses the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), or words and phrases found in over 5.2 million books digitised by Google. Data can be analysed from the year 1500 onwards, making it a particularly insightful tool for marketers, researchers as well as sociologists, historians and other research professionals.
If you’d like to see more examples of Ngrams, check out 10 Fascinating Charts From Google’s Ngram Viewer.
Take a look at the Google Books NGram Viewer »
Statcounter Global Stats
StatCounter Global Stats is provided by StatCounter – the free, online visitor stats tool. It publishes technical data, such as browser and operating system usage, and screen resolutions, for desktops, mobiles, tablets and consoles, across all countries.
Stats provided are based on aggregate data collected via more than 15 billion page views per month across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.
Take a look at Statcounter Global Stats »
Consumer BarometerThe Consumer Barometer is a free Google tool that publishes consumer insights to aid planning and decision-making across the digital landscape. Data from the Consumer Barometer is derived from two main sources: the core Consumer Barometer questionnaire, which is focused on the adult online population, and the Connected Consumer Study, which aims to enumerate the total adult population and is used to weight the Consumer Barometer results.
In addition to providing pre-defined consumer behaviour charts, it has a graph builder facility, allowing researchers to create their own charts based on consumer shopping and multi-device behaviour.
Take a look at Consumer Barometer »
Facebook AdvertisingWith well over a billion global users, Facebook represents a huge repository of consumer data. By using Facebook’s ad programme, researchers and marketers can tap into this data and gain valuable insight into consumer behaviour and data sizes.
When setting up an ad campaign, you can segment your audience, at which point Facebook will publish the potential audience size, allowing you to evaluate marketing potential. This part of the process is free and you are not obliged to make your campaign(s) live.
I have put together the example below in a matter of minutes. It illustrates the potential audience size of French speaking, single 18-30 year olds, who live in the UK and are interested in dating. A fairly fundamental piece of insight if I’m setting up a dating business targeting specific segments. Please note, this is not for personal reasons! Click on the link below and have a go yourself.
Take a look at Facebook Advertising »
Worldometers
Worldometers is run by an international team of developers and researchers, publishing world statistics. It was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), and was chosen as content provider at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), BBC News, and the National Media Museum (UK) among others.
Whilst it doesn’t allow segmentation of data, its country specific data is a valuable resource. And the real-time data found of its home page is both fascinating and shocking! Go take a look.
Take a look at Worldometers »
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular surveying tools available on the internet. It allows you to send out online surveys via email, links, website embeds and more. Question formats are highly flexible, including options for multiple choice, text boxes for longer answers, Likert scales and so on.
It has both free and premium plans, making it a good choice for businesses that want to dip their toes into research while still having the opportunity to upgrade later down the line.
| Research type:✓ Qualitative✓ Quantitative | Data type:✓ Demographic✓ Geographic✓ Psychographic✓ Behavioural |
Pros: SurveyMonkey is a robust, flexible surveying tool that is simple to use and simple to deploy. It provides a lot of functionality even with its free plan too—there’s a good reason it’s popular.
Cons: If you are unsure of how to create accurate survey questions that are free of bias, you may have difficulty with SurveyMonkey. Despite SurveyMonkey’s excellent set of tutorials on survey design, there is still a heavy reliance on your skillset as a user.
Further, while the free plan allows you to collect as many responses as you like, you can only view the first 100. That is not usually enough to create the robust market research you are looking for.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular surveying tools available on the internet. It allows you to send out online surveys via email, links, website embeds and more. Question formats are highly flexible, including options for multiple choice, text boxes for longer answers, Likert scales and so on.
It has both free and premium plans, making it a good choice for businesses that want to dip their toes into research while still having the opportunity to upgrade later down the line.
| Research type:✓ Qualitative✓ Quantitative | Data type:✓ Demographic✓ Geographic✓ Psychographic✓ Behavioural |
Pros: SurveyMonkey is a robust, flexible surveying tool that is simple to use and simple to deploy. It provides a lot of functionality even with its free plan too—there’s a good reason it’s popular.
Cons: If you are unsure of how to create accurate survey questions that are free of bias, you may have difficulty with SurveyMonkey. Despite SurveyMonkey’s excellent set of tutorials on survey design, there is still a heavy reliance on your skillset as a user.
Further, while the free plan allows you to collect as many responses as you like, you can only view the first 100. That is not usually enough to create the robust market research you are looking for.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks a wide variety of different metrics for your website, such as sessions, page views, dwell time and other page behaviour metrics . Essentially, it measures the performance of your site, giving you an idea of what kind of people visit your site, how many of them there are, how they get there and what they do once they’ve arrived.
It is a highly advanced tool that is considered a primary part of every research toolbox.
| Research type:✓ Qualitative✓ Quantitative | Data type:✓ Demographic✓ Geographic✓ Psychographic✓ Behavioural |
Pros: Google Analytics gives you access to every type of data you can imagine, including the actual interest categories of your audience, based on their previous Google searches.
Cons: Depending on the privacy of your users, you may not have data available for the entirety of your audience. You cannot guarantee opt-in from every user. Further, it can take months before you start getting useful data: if your website has only been recently launched, then you may need to wait until you get more audience results.
Be careful of using Analytics data for analysing your entire audience as well: it only measures online behaviour, and only on your website. If there is a significant portion of your customers that doesn’t visit the website, you will not capture their data.
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
Conclusion
In order to really get a grip on your competition, you have to get a grip on the market you are in. In addition, what is hot and what is not can also be very telling about what you should be doing with your business. This means there is a whole lot of research that has to go into finding out who your primary competitors are and an equal amount of time checking out what the latest trends are.