The right tools in hand will help you determine your product’s chances in the marketplace. Just like you need the right marketing research software, you need the right marketing research books to help carry out your marketing research. Having all of this at your fingertips will give you insight into how to better market your company’s products.
Get both the fundamentals and advanced research tools you need to conduct an effective marketing research study with this comprehensive guide. It covers planning, sampling, data collection techniques, analyzing data and reporting methods.
Google Keywords Tool
The Google Keywords tool acts as a window into the behaviour of consumers when searching online for products or services such as yours. To use this you’ll need to create a Google Adwords account (it’s free however) and it’s also advisable that you read a couple of introductory articles to the tool and making the most of it.
Survey Monkey
If you wish to get honest feedback about your product or services, Survey Monkey is probably the best for startups and small businesses. The Basic plan lets you create online surveys and polls, which you can send to your list for free.
KNIME Analytics Platform
KNIME is an open source data analytics, reporting and integration platform which integrates components of machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining concept.
Its interface allows assembly of over 1000 native and embedded nodes for data access, data transformation, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.
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
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.
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.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows you to quickly identify what content is working well in an industry and who the major influencers are.
Some of its main features are:
- Delivering Content Insights
- Instant Search of Last 12 Months
- View All Social Networks
- Advanced Filtering
- Social Backlinks
- Content Curation
- Competitor Comparisons
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.
Google Analytics
Whilst not technically a wider tool providing market research in its entirety, Google Analytics can provide feedback as to how your customers are behaving whilst on your website. It may show you which products many view, but few buy (or vice versa) and it can illustrate what social media channels your customers are responding to, amongst many other insights.
Consumer Barometer
This market research tool is free and best used by businesses that deal with online shopping. If you want to know what drives your consumers to buy your product – which is a good way of enhancing it as well – this tool is definitely handy. Any public user can use this tool.
Pickfu
Pickfu is a powerful market research tool to get reliable and unbiased real-world feedback within minutes. It is an interesting tool not only because it lets you test your idea and collect feedback from people out of your first-degree network but also because it does it within minutes of creating a poll.
With Pickfu, you not only get a definite and unbiased result of your poll, but also you get to know the reasons of why people selected the given option as the tool also shares the demographic information about the participants so you can break down the preferences by gender, age, income, etc. This research tool even lets you target a demographic to give you a feedback on your product, design, idea, etc.
Pickfu is a freemium tool which charges you per response ($1).
WordSift
Make My Persona is appealing, in part, because it enables you to make sense of raw data — to separate the signal from the noise. The same can be said about WordSift, the final free tool we’ll be discussing today.
Built to help teachers with the instruction of vocabulary and reading comprehension, WordSift allows you to generate word clouds: images that represent the frequency with which certain words are used in a given body of text. Look what happens when I copy the introduction to this blog post and paste it into WordSift:
Instantaneously — and unsurprisingly — I can conclude that “business,” “market,” and “research” are among the most frequently used words in the introduction to this post.
What does this have to do with market research? Well, let’s say you’ve been using SurveyMonkey to ask your customers about their reasons for buying your product. One by one, if you were to copy their responses and paste them into WordSift, you’d be able to see which words your customers use most often. That’s a market research gold mine!
Conclusion:
Understanding consumer behavior is not an easy task; it doesn’t help that marketers are faced with the task of quantifying the opinions of anonymous buyers. Using various tools and techniques, you can analyze your market based on their behavior, preferences, attitudes, and beliefs to develop marketing plans that sell.