market research tools

28 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

Published: April 30, 2024

Conducting market research pulls details together to help you choose new products or services to launch. They also help identify your audiences and best marketing strategies so you are ready to act without the guesswork.

Businesses use market research software to minimize risk and make more data-driven choices.

I own a small business, and by gathering facts and opinions, I can better predict whether new products or features — and for more prominent companies, even locations — will succeed before investing.

Here are 28 of the best tools for conducting market research, including a few recommendations directly from HubSpot market researchers and bloggers who use them.

Helpful Market Research Tools & Resources

1. similarweb.

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Similarweb is probably the highest quality, most well-known, and most convenient way to get and compare traffic information about any website you land on — short of having an expert analyst whispering in your ear, which could get awkward. Their free suite of products — including the Chrome extension — is worth exploring and gives you useful, high-level information. The deep insights come from taking advantage of their database of real-world information on global website performance gathered over time, which they’ve already been building for over 10 years. They have their finger on the pulse of online business worldwide, from sales to sites to stocks.

Microsoft, Amazon, and even Google use Similarweb and the insights they provide on other enterprise-level operations down to small businesses. If you want to know how your company stacks up and then initiate a robust research and marketing campaign, these are serious tools that can help you grow.

What I like: One of their add-ons is called App Intelligence, and it can benchmark your growth and track your progress against millions of apps — for both iOS and Android — and provide daily insights on app rankings, engagement, retention, and more.

Pricing: Starter plans cost $125 per month paid annually; professional plans cost $333 per month billed annually; team and enterprise plans have custom pricing.

For Max Iskiev , market research analyst at HubSpot, one research tool stands out from the rest: Glimpse.

He told me, “Glimpse is my favorite research tool. It’s quick and easy to use, allowing me to design and launch short surveys for real-time insights on trending topics.”

Writers for the HubSpot Marketing Blog have also used Glimpse to run short, 100-person surveys for articles (case in point: Are Sales Reps Rushing Back to the Office? ).

Not only is Glimpse valuable for doing quick pulse-checks on the latest trends, but it also leverages the power of AI for even deeper insights.

“Glimpse really shines when it comes to open-ended questions, using natural language processing and AI to analyze emotion and sentiment, saving time, and offering invaluable insights,” Iskiev shared.

Best for: Those who can invest in AI tools for their businesses but don’t need a decade’s deep dive like users of Similarweb might.

Pricing: Starter Plan - Free; Professional - $500/month; Advanced - $1,000/month; Enterprise - custom pricing.

Free Market Research Kit

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3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo offers several highly useful tools that work best as a content research tool for mid-size businesses and up. If you need many ideas for a whole lot of content, BuzzSumo is likely a good fit for your company.

Their monitoring tools can alert you to new content that relates to your keywords of choice.

This is smart for writers, content strategists, and those who manage writers and content strategists to stay on top of trends in what consumers want to know more about within your industry — so you’re right there to provide it.

BuzzSumo also gives you access to reporting tools that stream various sources of information to your dashboard, making it easy to keep up with developments and build visual assets to communicate about them.

You can find major influencers — worldwide — through BuzzSumo that fit your brand to sponsor and collaborate with.

Unfortunately, BuzzSumo doesn’t integrate well with Instagram, so you’ll want to focus on influencers that use other social channels unless you’re willing to do IG work on the side.

What I like: Their Chrome extension is a nice addition to their offerings for companies that work with freelancers and remote workers to take the work on the move.

Pricing: Free 30-day trials are available. Content creation plans cost $199 per month; PR and comms plans cost $299 per month; suite plans cost $499 per month; and Enterprise plans cost $999 per month.

4. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a sister product to UberSuggest, both being brainchildren of Neil Patel.

Answer: the Public watches what people are searching for and lets you keep track of how things change over time. By studying the changes, you can be at the front of trends — positive or negative — so you can respond to the changes quickly.

It’s billed as an excellent tool for public relations professionals to give them a heads-up on how their company is faring in the public eye.

If you fall on the wrong side of public sentiment, you can be right on top of salvaging the situation and making improvements to regain trust.

If you’re doing something right and see gains in positive engagement, you know to keep up what you’re doing and may even want to expand upon it.

Great examples of what organizations have done with information like this include Wendy’s ongoing roasts and savage clapbacks on social media.

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s hilarious insistence on not bringing mountain lions in the house also nabbed engagement by the truckloads (of corgis).

What I like: I like that Masterclass videos are available. They make sure to include lots of opportunities to learn how to best use their products and get maximum value from the suite.

Pricing: Individual plans cost $9 per month; pro plans cost $99 per month; expert plans cost $199 per month. Lifetime Pricing is available. Individual lifetime plans cost $99, pro lifetime plans cost $199; and expert lifetime plans cost $1,990.

5. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar SEO is all-in for AI. If your leadership wants a slice of the AI action at work in the company’s market research, this might be the tool to reach for.

It uses ChatGPT-4, and the peer-to-peer review site G2 ranked it the #1 AI writing tool for SEO in 2022 and 2023.

What sets it apart is that the AI writing assistant doesn’t just compile and give word to information it finds online.

It offers selections of relevant keywords, titles, headings, industry standard word counts, and link suggestions that you can choose from as you move through the outline.

They also include tools for keyword research, keyword ranking, and information about your keyword competitors. And because Google search is incorporated into the suite, you can do most, if not all, of your writing work on one screen.

Pro tip: As with all AI content, you’ll need a writer to bring the content to life by fact-checking information, adding unique or inside perspectives, meaningful quotes, and many other values that make the content rich to read.

GrowthBar SEO knows this, and you can source freelance writers there as well!

Pricing: A seven-day free trial is available. Standard plans cost $36 per month; pro plans cost $74.25 per month; and agency plans cost $149.25 per month.

6. Statista

Statista is a data visualization website that takes data from reputable reports across the web and makes them easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators just like you.

“Statista is like my market research sidekick, giving me all the data I need without the endless search. No more digging through the haystack. With Statista, I can spot trends and make informed decisions with ease," Icee Griffin , market researcher at HubSpot, told me.

One neat aspect of using Statista is that the same chart is updated as the years pass. Say that you want to allude to the value of the beauty market in your proposal.

If your investor accesses that same graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers. Statista finds the most recent research to update their visualizations.

Pro tip: Statista doesn’t carry out original research, but does have around 100 analysts who seek out gaps in their resources to provide ever more useful, trending data.

Pricing: Basic plans are free. Starter plans cost $199 per month, billed annually. Professional plans cost $959 per month, billed annually.

7. Think With Google Research Tools

Wish you had information on your product’s likelihood of success?

Think With Google’s marketing research tools offer interesting insights on whether anyone is looking for your product ( Google Trends ), which markets to launch to ( Market Finder ), and what retail categories rise as the months and seasons pass ( Rising Retail Categories ).

If you’d like to market your product through YouTube, the Find My Audience tool allows you to investigate what your potential viewers are interested in and what you should discuss on your brand’s YouTube channel.

What I like: Free and incredibly useful in my experience, small and newer businesses really benefit from having tools like this to conduct market research and get their growth rolling.

Pricing : Free

8. Census Bureau

The Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching U.S. census data.

You can filter by age, income, year, and location. You can also use some of its shortcuts to access visualizations of the data, allowing you to see potential target markets across the country.

If you’re considering a highly competitive product or service, you can easily find out where your target industry is most popular — or where the market has been oversaturated.

Another helpful tool is the Census Bureau Business and Economy data , where you can also target premade tables depending on your industry.

Pro tip: The text information on each screen can be overwhelming, so here’s a shortcut for you. One of the best ways to use this tool is by finding the NAICS code for your business.

Then, access the " Tables “ tool, click ”Filter" on the sidebar, and search for your industry.

9. Make My Persona

HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. In this tool, you pick a name for the persona, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges.

This allows you to pinpoint both demographic and psychographic information.

Creating a buyer persona is an early step in the marketing process but an important one to avoid scope creep.

If you’re unsure about details like these and how to use market research tools for your business, let me recommend Hubspot’s Market Research Kit .

It’s completely free and helps you build a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making in your future marketing strategies.

Best for: Make My Persona is best suited to B2B product launches because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges.

Ideally, your product would solve a problem for them in the workplace or help their company achieve revenue goals.

10. Tableau

Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to “connect to virtually any data source.” But the data isn’t presented in unreadable tables.

Rather, Tableau helps you visualize this data in a way that helps you glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.

You can visualize data on anything from corn production in tropical climate zones to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look you’d like into potential marketplaces and supplier regions.

What I like: Visual information for humans and pure data for the machines all in one. Tableau integrates well with spreadsheets and databases so that you can export Tableau data to Excel , back up records in Amazon Redshift, and more.

Pricing : Tableau Viewer plans cost $14 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Explorer plans cost $42 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Creator plans cost $75 per user each month when billed annually.

11. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a web and social media monitoring tool that allows businesses to discover people's thoughts about their brands, campaigns, products, or services.  Users can create and customize reports and get data-driven insights that will help them make informed decisions. They can also filter results by language, location, and social media channel to personalize results.  Analyzing sentiment and emotion lets you easily understand what will work for your brand and industry and what you should avoid.  The Share of Voice report allows you to benchmark against your direct competitors and industry. You can also identify trends and discover influencers in your niche and area to boost your next steps.

Best for: Mentionlytics is great for competitor analysis and crisis detection. Their Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) turns large volumes of data into understandable knowledge to offer custom advice on crisis detection and brand growth.

Pricing: A 14-day free trial is available for most plans. Basic plans cost $69 per month; Essential plans cost $139 per month; Advanced plans cost $249 per month; Pro plans cost $399 per month; Agency plans cost $599 per month; Enterprise plans cost $950 per month. Annual billing options offer discounts.

12. Meltwater

Meltwater’s Radarly consumer intelligence suite is a perfect market research tool as it provides continuous insights that keep you ahead of various market trends and your competitors. Radarly monitors a wide range of global data sources to uncover what people are discussing, their behaviors, and their sentiments toward particular brands. It helps businesses understand consumer preferences and market dynamics in real time, which makes it easier to make strategic decisions.

What we like: Meltwater provides the online Meltwater Academy, providing you with an extensive amount of tutorial videos tips, and tricks on how to get started using Radarly. 

Pricing: Custom, you will need to book a demo call with Meltwater to get a quote

13. SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow is a market research tool designed for researchers and businesses to create engaging surveys and gather concrete data. With an emphasis on a conversational, easy-to-use interface, you can create targeted surveys that provide detailed insights into your market and consumer preferences. 

This market survey software comes with 1000+ pre-designed, pre-loaded survey templates, allowing you to create the perfect study without external help. You can also integrate it with various other tools you use daily for a seamless workflow.

One of SurveySparrow’s standout features is its robust analytics and reporting tools. With real-time capture and advanced report filters, you can slice and dice the data - the way you like. 

Best for: The platform offers a unique recurring survey feature, which allows you to send surveys at regular intervals automatically. This is particularly useful for tracking changes in user sentiment over time.

Pricing: SurveySparrow offers a 14-day free trial. Basic plans start at $19 per month; the starter plan is priced at $39 per month; Enterprise plans are available upon request for custom pricing.

14. Paperform

A market research survey is an effective way to better understand your target audience and their needs by asking them directly.

This step is integral to understanding your dream customers’ problems, so you want to ensure the process is as interactive as possible and gathers objective, accurate responses.

With its free-text interface, Paperform is as simple as writing a Word document. You can make your survey stand out by customizing colors, fonts, layouts, and themes to create your unique look and feel.

There are 27+ question field types, such as ranking, matrix, or scale fields. Use several to create visually engaging surveys that collect more information and see higher completion stats.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can use one of their expertly-made questionnaires or market research survey templates to get you started.

Best for: In my experience, Paperform can efficiently incorporate multiple customer personas. It uses conditional logic to show or hide questions or whole sections of content to create fully personalized paths. These interactive forms lower drop-off rates and boost customer interaction.

Pricing:  Essentials plans cost $29 per month. Pro plans cost $59 per month. Business plans cost $199 per month. For enterprise pricing, contact Paperform’s sales team.

GWI is an on-demand consumer research platform that makes audience research a breeze. Powered by the world’s largest study on the online consumer base, GWI provides insights into the lives of over 2.8 billion consumers across 50+ markets.

With 250k+ profiling points, you can find your unique customers and learn everything you need to know about who they are, what’s on their minds, and what they’re up to.

One user-friendly platform makes it quick and easy to become an expert on your audience and capture the answers you need to succeed.

Pro tip: GWI even has features to compare markets and create customized and shareable charts in seconds, helping you distribute critical information as quickly as you find it.

Pricing: Explore Interactive Demo for free; Flexible and custom pricing with discounts available.

16. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth market research surveys that will help you understand your market and consumer preferences.

With this tool, you can create targeted, uber-specific surveys that help you collect answers that pertain specifically to your product.

While using a data source can give you a general overview of your target audience and market, SurveyMonkey can help you get more granular insights from real consumers.

SurveyMonkey offers dedicated market research solutions and services and a reporting dashboard option that allows you to easily parse through the results.

What I like: I like that SurveyMonkey is a good fit for exploring markets beyond your shores. It includes a global survey panel and survey translation service for international research.

• Individual plans: Advantage annual plans cost $39 per month. Premier annual plans cost $119 a month. Monthly plans cost $99 per month.
• Team plans: Team advantage plans cost $29 per person each month. Team premier plans cost $75 per person each month.
• Enterprise pricing is available upon request.

17. Typeform

Like SurveyMonkey, Typeform allows you to run research surveys to get direct answers from your target consumers. It’s an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that’s great for market research.

Typeform’s distinguishing factor is that it shows viewers one form field at a time. In its templates, Typeform encourages a more conversational, casual approach (like in its market research survey template ).

You can create a wide range of question types, and other features include the ability to recall answers from previous questions and create logic jumps.

In a survey, you’d want to collect both demographic and psychographic information on your customers to understand their purchasing behaviors and the problems they encounter.

The goal is to find out if your product is the solution to one of those problems — and whether, before launching, you should add more features or rethink your product positioning strategy .

Best for: I think Typeform is best for product launches that target a younger demographic.

If you’re targeting C-suite executives at established firms, consider a more formal option, such as SurveyMonkey, or keeping your tone more formal in your questions.

Pricing: Free plans are available. Basic plans cost $29 per month. Plus plans cost $59 per month. Business plans cost $99 per month. Enterprise plans are available upon request.

18. PureSpectrum Insights (Previously Upwave Instant Insights )

PureSpectrum acquired Upwave Instant Insights in 2021 and rebranded as PureSpectrum Insights.

As before, this platform is primarily a consumer research tool. While it isn’t advertised as a survey creation tool, it allows you to launch market research surveys specifically to get consumer insights.

PureSpectrum allows you to perform customer and market segmentation and also to visualize your data for easy scanning by key stakeholders and investors. They’ve grown to include A/B testing, brand tracking, and customer sentiment.

Pro tip: PureSpectrum distributes your survey to real people. Take a look at their marketplace profile to get a sense of where and from whom you can collect valuable data.

Pricing: Schedule a demo for more information.

19. Claritas MyBestSegment

Claritas MyBestSegment provides product researchers with tools to understand a specific area’s demographic information as well as the lifestyle habits of those who live there.

Their audience segments give you information gleaned from tens of thousands of data points, giving you insight into much more than just household income, employment, and education levels.

By finding out what a segment of the population does — without having to go out and survey them — you can find out which areas would be most receptive to a campaign or launch.

You can also discover which competitors are located nearby and which lifestyle trends have shifted or are on the rise.

What I like: I like that they are able to do some of the leg work for you. Syndicated Audiences is a tool available from Claritas for finding an organized audience of consumers who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

Loop11 is a user experience testing platform that allows you to test the usability of your website, study user intent, test the information architecture of your site, and examine how the user experience changes based on the device they’re using.

Loop11 tests your site on any device by making users perform tasks. They then complete a short question about how easy or difficult the task was to complete.

Your product may be phenomenal, but unless consumers can actually buy it through your site, your launch won’t be successful.

You can use Loop11’s participants for niche demographics or bring in your own to learn more about your current customers.

Best for: Market research for your site development. You can find out whether your target consumers find your site easy to navigate and also identify snags that prevent conversions.

Pricing: Rapid Insights plans cost $199 monthly or $179 per month, billed annually. Pro plans cost $399 per month or $358 per month, billed annually. Enterprise plans cost $599 per month or $533 per month, billed annually.

21. Userlytics

Like Loop11, Userlytics allows you to test the usability of your website, mobile app, and site prototype. You can target different devices, define a buyer persona, and disqualify participants based on screening questions.

Testing is based on tasks that your test-takers carry out. They then answer a simple question about the difficulty of the task. You can structure the question in various ways:

You can leave it open-ended, provide multiple choices, or ask for a rating. Other formats you can use include System Usability Scale (SUS) questions, Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions, and Single Ease Questions (SEQ).

What I like: Userlytics performs both a webcam and a screen recording. You can compare the user’s answers with their reactions on video to understand how they feel when they’re interacting with your assets.

Pricing: Schedule a free demo for more information.

Sometimes, you need a no-frills test to take the pulse of consumers. Temper allows you to create a question and pop it onto your website, into your emails, etc.

The smiley face, “meh” face, and frowny face make it easy for viewers to share their feelings — and for you to read their minds.

You can also add it to a product page or a landing page, tailoring the questions to fit your offerings.

As for what you see, there are three options for receiving the feedback: in a tab on each page you are monitoring, embedded in the web page itself to narrow in on aspects within the page, or at the bottom of emails so you can get real-time information as the interaction unfolds.

Pro tip: One great way I’ve seen this used is by adding it to a blog post announcing the launch of a new product. You can find out general sentiment toward the product before it even launches!

Pricing: Hobby plans cost $12 per month. Pro plans cost $49 per month. Business plans cost $89 per month. White label plans cost $199 per month.

23. NielsenIQ (NIQ)

NielsenIQ (NIQ) is a retail and consumer intelligence consultant that works with you to collect consumer insights, identify the best distribution channels for your product, and create a range of products to address the needs of your target buyers.

This service helps you look at your product launch from all angles, delivering forecasting data that predicts how your sales will perform upon launch. NielsenIQ can also run consumer insights surveys on their list of panelists and partners.

NIQ now offers a service called Byzzer to help small businesses with fewer resources. It opens a door for market research reporting, in-person events, and consulting at a lower cost than the full NIQ suite.

Best for: I think Byzzer can be a helpful and affordable option for smaller businesses, but because NielsenIQ operates like a consultant and not as a self-service software, it is a better option for established firms with a bigger product launch budget.

Pricing: Pricing is available on request.

24. Ubersuggest

Don’t be intimidated by the visually text-heavy Ubersuggest. It really is an easy tool for doing keyword and content research. You just input a phrase, and it’ll create a list of keyword suggestions.

You can also see top-performing articles and pages to better understand the types of content that rank for those keywords.

This tool is useful for market research because you can see who your top competitors are, how often your product is searched for, and whether there’s enough space in the market for the type of product you’re launching.

You can also find out the questions your target audience asks in relation to the product. Each of these questions can be turned into an informative blog post that can guide your audience, increase your brand authority, and drive conversions.

Pro tip: If you want a quick look at the results you can get, head to their website and do a search — just know that you only get one glimpse before they make you register. Alternatives to Ubersuggest include Moz , Ahrefs , and SEMRush .

Pricing: Free seven-day trials are available for all three tiers. Individual plans cost $29 per month. Business plans cost $49 per month. Enterprise and agency plans cost $99 per month. Add-ons are available at $5 each. Lifetime memberships are also available.

25. Pew Research Center

From economic conditions to political attitudes, social media usage to food science, the Pew Research Center website has loads of free research that you can use to better understand your target markets.

Be careful with your curiosity, though. It’s a gorgeous trap of interesting information that can drain your day away — but so happily.

I that Pew Research Center integrates visual data directly into the text — and we’re not talking about a chart or image spliced in.

The site has hundreds of interactive articles that allow you to filter and sift through the data for more granular, targeted insights while also making dense information easier to understand.

Their research topic selection is delightfully vast. Click the top left tab for “ Research Topics.” Then, there is a link to their “ Full Topic List .” Once there, each topic cluster has a “ More ” option.

What I like: As a writer in digital marketing, I am always on the hunt for targeted and nutritious quotes and insights. I love that you have access to what research participants actually had to say below the Pew Research articles.

It’s a stellar feature for building compelling presentations. The quotes are tagged, too, so you can sort quotes more specifically on various concepts or groups related to the research.

Here’s an example article — scroll to the In Their Own Words section at the bottom to check it out.

26. SocialMention (Part of BrandMentions)

SocialMention is a part of BrandMentions focused on social media monitoring. The platform helps you understand what your prospective customers are buzzing about online.

Search for a keyword, and SocialMentions will show you recent social posts that contain that keyword, along with the context of its usage.

After subscribing to the platform, you’ll also get other metrics such as Reach (how many people view the keyword per day), Performance (how many people engage with the keyword per day), and Mentions by Weekday (when people mention the keyword).

One way to use this tool for market research is by finding out what time of day or night people are looking for your product on social media sites.

Let’s say you’ve developed a sleeping aid app and learn through SocialMention that most people look for sleeping aid apps at 2:00 AM. When you start announcing your product, you will need to schedule your post around 2:00 AM.

Pro tip: Another useful tool you’ll have access to is sentiment analysis on your keywords. It allows you to find out how people are generally feeling about the type of product you’re launching.

That way, you can refine the tone of your campaigns.

Pricing: Growing business plans cost $79 per month. Company plans cost $249 per month. Enterprise and agency plans cost $399 per month. All prices are billed annually.

27. Qualtrics Market Research Panels

Qualtrics takes away the hassle of finding respondents for your market research surveys. They provide an online sample service so you can access real, live human thoughts without having to actually manage any humans.

It’s an introverted marketer’s dream come true!

Once you’ve identified your target audience, head on over to Qualtrics and sign up to access a representative sample.

You can then use Qualtrics’ built-in platform to start gathering insights and information from the people whose pain points you might be able to help solve.

Pro tip: You can actually choose between Qualtrics’ built-in platform or using your own chosen survey software . Sometimes, you’re already familiar and comfy with one system or need to hustle with a program you know — Qualtrics lets you pick.

28. ProProfs Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an advanced user and market research tool that helps you understand your specific market with targeted surveys.

You can run surveys on over six channels at once — such as website, app, product, social media, and email — to get a 360-degree view of your existing and potential customers.

It comes packed with features like question branching, 12+ answer types, automatic survey language translation, in-depth audience targeting, pre-built survey templates, and an extensive repository of professionally designed questions.

You can create various market research surveys in minutes to collect data on the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits of your target audience.

It can help you map customers’ expectations and preferences, create customer personas, and perform audience segmentation.

Qualaroo also promotes quick feedback analysis. Its in-built AI-based sentiment analysis and text analytics engine automatically categorizes the responses based on user moods.

It also highlights the key phrases and words in real time, saving hours of manual work.

What we like: In my experience, you can get an awful lot done with just this one source for conducting market research. I like it for its rare combination of tool inclusivity and affordable pricing — it’s definitely a solid source to start with.

Pricing: Omni channel plans for up to 50 responses are free. Omni channel plans for businesses up to 100 responses cost $19.99 per month, billed annually. Email surveys up to 50 responses are free.

Email surveys for businesses up to 100 responses cost $9.99 per month, billed annually.

Conduct Market Research for a Successful Product Launch

Conducting market research is essential to a successful product launch to market.

With the tools I’ve just introduced you to, you can find out who’s looking for your product, why they need it, and how you can better market whatever you’re looking to launch.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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The 8 free market research tools and resources you need to know.

With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent.  However, conducting market research isn’t an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you have access to an endless array of top-tier tools and resources, you can uncover strategy-changing insights with relative ease.

Does that mean businesses with small (or non-existent) budgets are out of luck? Absolutely not.

Nowadays, free market research tools and resources are abundant — and you’ll be familiar with eight of our favorites by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

But first, some housekeeping:

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers — both current and prospective — with the intent of optimizing your business strategy.

Customer-related information that you may want to gather includes (but is not limited to):

• The goals they want to achieve
• The pain points they want to alleviate
• The income or budget that constrains them
• The products and/or services they use (a.k.a. your competitors)
• The strengths and weaknesses of the products and/or services they use

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because — if you’re thorough and open-minded — it dramatically improves your chances of long-term success. Only through market research can you uncover the insights you need to develop a product or service that (1) satisfies the demands of your prospects and (2) stands out from the competition.

For a complete overview of how conducting market research can benefit your business, here’s Market Research Defined and How to Get Started .

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive into the good stuff.

Top 4 Free Market Research Tools

For clarity, we will define a free market research tool as any tool that:

• Costs nothing, and
• Helps with the collection and/or analysis of customer-related information

Keep in mind that “customer-related information” encompasses everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

1. 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.

2. SurveyMonkey

As some of you already know, one of the best ways to conduct market research is to ask your customers a handful of open-ended questions. You can do this for free with SurveyMonkey .

Specifically, with a free SurveyMonkey account, you can ask up to 10 questions and field up to 40 responses with each of your surveys.

Open-ended questions you may ask your customers include (but are not limited to):

• Why did you buy our product?
• What has our product helped you accomplish?
• How does our product compare to others that you’ve used in the past?

With just three questions — well under the limit of a free survey — you can learn quite a bit about your target market. If, for example, the majority of respondents say they bought your product because they were struggling to do their jobs in a cost-effective manner, that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ pain points and your competitors’ weaknesses .

3. 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.

4. 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!

Top 4 Free Market Research Resources

Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:

• Helps with the collection of customer-related information

The scope of “customer-related information" remains the same  —  encompassing everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

5. 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.

6. U.S. Census Bureau

On a mission to “serve as the [United States’] leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” the U.S. Census Bureau is another terrific resource that costs nothing to use.

Just as we did with the BLS, we’ll focus on industry- and region-specific information. Admittedly, using the Census website to find industry-specific information is slightly more complicated than it is when using the BLS website. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Explore Data drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink titled “Explore Data Main.”

Click on that, and you’ll be brought to the Census’ search engine. Then, click inside the search bar and select “Advanced Search.”

Underneath “Find A Filter,” type in the name of the industry you’re interested in researching. Once the search suggestions load, simply check the appropriate box and click “Search.”

From there, you’ll be able to explore thousands of data tables, maps, and whitepapers — many of them chock-full of industry-specific information that you can use to your advantage.

Finding region-specific information is a bit more straightforward. Head back to the Advanced Search engine, select “Geography” from underneath Browse Filters, and go from there:

7. 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!

We’ll wrap up today’s guide with a free resource specifically for those of you in the software world. Designed to help buyers determine which products are best suited to their needs, G2 is the leading source of validated, unbiased software reviews.

G2 is, in other words, an excellent way to find out what your target customers are saying about your competitors’ products. Do a quick search for the type of software you’re developing and you’re in business.

If you were developing a sales compensation software product and you searched this keyword, you’d be brought to the page you see below. To learn more about Spiff — one of your top-rated industry competitors — all you’d need to do is click “Read Spiff Reviews.”

If you want to get granular, you can filter reviews in a number of different ways. As an example, let’s say you’re developing a sales compensation software product specifically for small businesses. G2 has the filter you’re looking for:

And just like that, you’ve got access to dozens of valuable insights like this one:

Start using market research tools today!

If you try to bring a product or service to market without an understanding of your target customers, your chances of success are slim. According to the most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report , 84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years. With the range of choices at your prospects’ fingertips growing by the day, the need for a thorough market research strategy only intensifies.

We hope you find these free market research tools and resources useful. And if you decide to make the leap to a paid solution, make sure to request a demo of Crayon — the competitive intelligence platform that enables you to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside your businesses’ four walls.

Seeing is believing! Check out Crayon for yourself.

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15 Top Market Research Tools & Software (2024)

In this guide, we’ll cover the 17 best free and paid market research software tools that you can use right now. 

From data collection to conducting one-on-one interviews with key members of your audience, these tools can make the market research process more effective and efficient.

1. Statista

Statista is a statistics portal that also offers customized market research reports. 

To quickly find relevant reports, type in a keyword (like “beverages”) and Statista will produce a list of results.

The information you can get from Statista makes it easy to gauge an industry’s:

• Trend direction
• Consumer behavior

These critical signals can help you decide whether or not to invest or expand into that market.

Statista data comes from three primary sources:

• 49% of the data comes from Statista’s original research (the company employs over 100 data analysts)
• 16% comes from publicly accessible data sources
• 35% is obtained through unique data partnerships, such as with market research institutions

You can even opt to talk to one of Statista’s professional researchers to get further help and insights during your market research process.

It is important to note, though, that the quality of data you find on Statista may vary. This is because a number of the reports—particularly the free ones—are based on public data.

Who Should Use Statista?

Statista is useful for investors seeking their next opportunity, as well as business leaders who want to better understand the competitive landscape.

How Much Does Statista Cost?

Much of Statista’s data is available for free. For advanced insights and reports, you can purchase a paid plan. Options start at $199 per month; you can also purchase single, comprehensive reports for $495.

2. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting tool. 

Knowing about a trend before it takes off is the holy grail of market research. The problem, though, is that most trend analysis is highly subjective and based on someone’s best guess about what may take off in the future. 

We built Exploding Topics to solve this problem by identifying trends based on big data. 

The flagship feature is our Trends Database, which contains over 750,000 trending topics across 30+ industries like fashion, finance, tech, marketing, pets, beauty, and more. 

When you view a trend in our database, you’ll see a graph of the trend’s historical search volume. This can help you gauge a topic’s popularity and stability. Users on our Investor and Business plans can also see a forecast of the trend’s projected growth: 

We source our data through social listening—tracking what’s being discussed on:

• Social media
• Business websites
• News media sites

By using a mix of artificial intelligence and human data analysis, we rapidly gather this trend data and qualify it to identify the most popular topics.

We update our database with this information every day, so you’re always getting the most up-to-date trend data.

Exploding Topics also offers a handful of other helpful tools that you can use for market research, too. These include our:

• Trend Search : While our core database is great for discovering new trends, the search feature is useful if you already know what you want to see data about. It’s a good alternative to Google Trends.
• Meta Trends : If you want to see the products and brands that are currently riding a trend wave, you can do so by using our Meta Trends feature.
• Trending Startups : Investors can use the Trending Startups list to identify new and rapidly growing companies in any category.
• Trending Products : When you’re interested in expanding your reach or offerings, the Trending Products feature helps you identify hot products that are currently seeing rapid growth.

Who Should Use Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is great for investors, entrepreneurs, marketers, and business leaders who need to understand what the competition looks like right now —and how it might change in the near future.

How Much Does Exploding Topics Cost?

You can view much of our basic trend data for free right now. To unlock all our data, as well as extra features like our lists of trending products and startups, you’ll need a paid plan.

Options start at $39 per month (billed annually), and you can get a two-week trial of any paid plan for just $1.

3. Market Finder

Market Finder is a free Google tool that makes it easy to discover international markets that are ripe for expansion. 

Rather than uncovering specific trends, Market Finder shows you new regions and demographics with strong potential for future growth.

It has two primary tools:

• Dive into new markets : This feature walks you through a quick quiz that identifies your industry and collects some specifications about your company. Then, it shows you which companies would be ideal for expansion based on data from Google Ads, search volume, and household income.
• Test export readiness : Enter your URL in this tool; it’ll analyze your readiness for expansion based on marketing performance (international traffic, e-commerce capabilities, etc.), operational abilities (payment fit, localization capabilities, etc.) and competitive position (category demand).

If you have Google Analytics set up, then Market Explorer can pull data directly from the Google Analytics dashboard for increased accuracy.

Who Should Use Market Explorer?

If you’d like to expand your business and find marketing opportunities in new regions, then Market Explorer is a useful tool. It’s also a good choice for investors who would like to identify new regions in which they can seek potential investment opportunities.

How Much Does Market Explorer Cost?

Market Explorer is free to use.

4. Census Business Builder

The Census Business Builder is a tool that allows brick-and-mortar business owners to explore new geographic markets.

You can use the tool to search by zip code, town, or state and see metrics like:

• Average household income
• Typical education level

The Census Business Builder also has advanced filters that can provide valuable, detailed insights based on the type of business you’re launching.

For example, if you’re opening a fast casual restaurant, you can use the “Consumer Spending” filter and see how much people spend on alcoholic beverages and dining out in a selected region.

You’ll still need to turn Census Business Builder data into actionable insights, though. Once you do, it can be a valuable tool for deciding where to open a new retail establishment.

Who Should Use The Census Business Builder?

Retailers and restaurateurs interested in expanding to new markets can use this tool to find a hot spot. It’s also a useful tool for investors who would like to identify markets for potential investment opportunities.

How Much Does The Census Business Builder Cost?

It’s entirely free.

5. Grand View Research

Grand View Research is a research and consulting company that also offers market reports across a variety of industries. 

Most of their market research reports provide statistics like market size, compounding annual growth rate, market breakdown by sectors, and competitive analysis.

Grand View's paid offering allows you to segment the data to find more specific metrics (i.e., only data for the Japanese pet market).

In addition to the free reports, Grand View Research also offers custom research services, and you can talk to one of their analysts for personalized assistance.

Who Should Use Grand View Research?

The company’s reports and services are useful for entrepreneurs who want to launch a business, existing business leaders interested in finding new opportunities, and investors looking for high-growth markets.

How Much Does Grand View Research Cost?

You can access limited data about many of Grand View Research’s reports for free; licensing a full report can cost over $3,000. You can also opt to use the company’s self-service market research portal, Horizon Databook , and get additional data points for free.

SpyFu is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool for keyword research and competitive analysis. 

The platform’s various features make it easy to discover the marketing strategies used by top players in your market or industry. Type in any URL, and you’ll be able to find metrics like:

• Total search traffic
• Search rankings
• Current Google Ads
• Pay per click (PPC) ads history
• Paid keywords

You can then use this data to learn more about one of your top competitors or look at several companies in order to better understand a new market.

Who Should Use SpyFu?

Marketers and business leaders can use SpyFu to better understand who their competitors are—and how much they need to spend on marketing in order to be competitive.

Investors can also use SpyFu to research how potential investment targets are investing in marketing (and what kind of growth they’re seeing as a result.)

How Much Does SpyFu Cost?

You can see a limited amount of SpyFu data for free. Paid plans, which give you access to more features, start at $33 per month when billed annually.

7. Crunchbase

The platform makes it easy to find data like how much money a startup has raised to date, who’s investing in a growing business, or who founded a key industry player.

You can also see other data points through Crunchbase, including acquisition and employee headcount.

To use Crunchbase for market research, just type in an industry and filter results by the type of data you’re seeking. Crunchbase will show you a list of companies that meet the defined criteria.

You can also type in a specific company or competitor name and locate data that way, too.

Who Should Use Crunchbase?

Crunchbase is a valuable tool for nearly everyone involved in business management and funding.

• Entrepreneurs can use the tool to explore new markets and find potential investors.
• Business leaders can keep tabs on competitor growth and relevant industry acquisitions.
• VC firms and investors can monitor how others are investing in growing companies, or explore the investment potential in a new market.

How Much Does Crunchbase Cost?

You can see limited information for free; full Crunchbase access starts at $49 per month (billed annually).

Awario is a social media monitoring and brand tracking tool. 

You can use Awario for market research by tracking specific terms on social media. These can include:

• Brand names
• Product keywords
• Industry influencers’ names

For example, if you’re considering building or investing in a mobile app for sleep tracking, you can easily monitor brand names like Oura or keywords like “sleep tracker”.

This makes it easy to see key industry conversations and glean valuable insights about your ideal buyer persona. You can also identify potential gaps in the market.

Awario even tracks sentiment analysis to see how people feel about various competitors in your target industry.

Who Should Use Awario?

Awario is useful for marketers who want to understand their audience’s frustrations or needs, as well as entrepreneurs and product developers interested in using customer data to improve business offerings.

How Much Does Awario cost?

Awario access starts at $29 per month, billed annually.

G2 is a popular software review website. 

It’s a great resource for quickly finding quantitative and qualitative data about virtually any software market.

The G2 review structure is helpful as it consists of the following questions:

• What do you like best about (product)?
• What do you dislike about (product)?
• What problems is (product) solving and how is that benefiting you?

This customer experience data is a goldmine for investors and startup founders as it makes it easy to spot gaps in a market and understand key pain points that customers are trying to solve.

Plus, G2 provides a list of competitors for each product—useful for identifying related companies to research.

When browsing G2, you can see details about each reviewer including their:

• Business size

This is all useful for accurately identifying your market’s target demographic. You can also filter a product’s reviews by any of those categories.

The platform makes an effort to ensure that the customer feedback is legitimate by allowing users to verify themselves and even marking incentivized reviews.

Who Should Use G2?

G2 is useful for entrepreneurs and product marketers who want to identify and fill gaps in a market. It’s also a good tool for investors who want to learn more about how real users feel about a potential investment target.

The platform only contains software reviews, though. If you’re looking for reviews of other products and companies, you’ll need to find an alternate source (such as Amazon reviews for consumer goods).

How Much Does G2 Cost?

G2 is free for users to browse reviews, though it offers other paid plans for marketers and investors.

10. Prisync

Prisync is a competitor price tracking tool. 

Its automated features make Prisync a great choice for e-commerce entrepreneurs. Use it to:

• Track competitor product pricing and fluctuations
• Estimate customer demand for certain products
• Get price change updates multiple times a day
• Automatically apply dynamic pricing to your own e-commerce storefront

While Prisync is usually best for e-commerce stores that have already launched, you can also use its competitive analysis features to track pricing trends for top players in any market.

For example, in addition to tracking real-time price fluctuations, Prisync also has a price history tracking feature that provides insight into how prices are trending over time, which helps you identify volatility in the market.

Who Should Use Pricsync?

Prisync is most useful for e-commerce startups that want to stay up-to-date with the latest pricing and product trends.

How Much Does Prisync Cost?

Prisync plans start at $99 per month, and pricing depends on the number of products you track. Some features are restricted to higher price tiers, including dynamic pricing, daily email notifications, and API access.

11. Respondent

Respondent is a market research platform for recruiting audience panels.

You can use the Respondent service to find vetted audience members that match your ideal target. Submit a request detailing who you want to talk to—such as CFOs and healthcare companies—and Respondent will find people for you.

You can opt to either talk to these people on one-to-one calls (ideal for getting real-time insights) or run group surveys through Respondent.

Who Should Use Respondent?

Respondent is useful for business leaders and entrepreneurs trying to find the right product-market fit for both B2B and B2C audiences. Investors can use Respondent too—it can be a way to research a particular target market before making an investment.

How Much Does Respondent Cost?

Respondent pricing is based on credits. One credit equals one participant in your interview or survey.

Pricing starts at $24 per B2C credit or $40 per B2B credit. These prices vary based on the total number of credits you purchase. However, you’ll also need to factor in separate incentive payments to respondents. Respondent’s incentive calculator can help you estimate this amount.

12. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a user-friendly tool for building market research surveys 

You can choose from multiple survey templates and question types, including:

• NPS surveys
• Product testing surveys
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Matrix questions
• Open-ended questions
• Rating scales
• Multiple choice questions

If you don’t have an audience to survey, you can use SurveyMonkey’s audience panel service that distributes your survey to a specific demographic.

To use these audience panels, you’ll need to know a few details about your target market—such as “stay-at-home moms with a household income of at least $50,000.” SurveyMonkey will take care of the rest.

It’s important to note, though, that these audiences are fairly broad, such as “college graduates” or “smartphone owners” who meet a few other demographic criteria. If you need highly specific audience curation, you may want to work with a market research firm .

No matter what distribution method you choose, you’ll get to use SurveyMonkey’s drag-and-drop builder to put together questions in your preferred order.

Who Should Use SurveyMonkey?

SurveyMonkey is great for market researchers that want to learn more about a target audience group, as well as business owners and marketing professionals seeking feedback from their existing customers.

How Much Does SurveyMonkey Cost?

You can build limited surveys for free, though they’ll include SurveyMonkey branding. To unlock additional features, you’ll need a paid plan.

SurveyMonkey’s paid plans start at $39 per month, billed annually. You can also request audience responses for $1 each, with a minimum of 200 responses per survey.

Attest is another online survey software option. 

Like Respondent, Attest provides an audience for you to survey. All you need to do is provide demographic information about who you're targeting, and the questions you want to ask.

Attest can assemble audiences from a pool of over 125 million consumers around the world.

The company then uses a mix of AI scanning and human oversight to review the data collected by your attest survey. This is to improve the reliability and consistency of your data.

Attest won't turn your data into insights, though—once you get your results, you'll have to use other tools to help with the analysis.

Who Should Use Attest?

Attest is useful for business leaders or marketers who want to get audience insights or user feedback—without an existing customer base to survey.

Investors could also use Attest to learn more about consumer preferences and habits in a market.

How Much Does Attest Cost?

Attest offers three plans based on usage, but they don't publish their prices online. You'll need to get in touch with the company and request a quote.

14. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an audience survey tool.

The platform makes it easy to set up questionnaires that appear on your website at different intervals during a visitor's journey.

Companies can use Qualaroo to gather more information about things like:

• Visitor needs and motivations
• App or website user decisions
• Purchase decisions
• Products for sale

You can target website visitors based on time of day, location, and more. This makes it possible to research specific groups of visitors—useful for building or verifying audience personas.

You can also use Qualaroo to collect focus group feedback about website and app prototypes before you launch them.

The company doesn’t provide audiences for you, though, so you’ll need to have a group that you can survey. If not, you’ll be better served by a tool like Attest or Respondent.

Who Should Use Qualaroo?

Any business leader or entrepreneur in need of audience data can use Qualaroo to get feedback from real customers and leads, build out audience surveys, plan marketing campaigns, and more.

How Much Does Qualaroo Cost?

Qualaroo's free plan allows users to collect up to 50 survey responses a month for free. If you want higher usage limits, you'll need to subscribe to a paid plan.

The company's business tier plan costs $39.99 per month (or $19.99 per month when billed annually) per 100 responses.

You'll be billed extra for any month in which you go over 100 responses; the total cost depends on volume.

15. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI chat assistant that can help you plan for and analyze market research efforts.

There are several ways that ChatGPT is useful during the market research process, including:

• Reviewing information about your target audience and creating survey questions
• Processing and analyzing data collected from tools like Attest or SurveyMonkey
• Analyzing, summarizing, and answering questions about data-heavy PDF reports
• Creating customer persona documents

If you have a ChatGPT Plus plan, you can even train your own GPT to produce the analysis or content that you need. It's possible to save and reuse these GPTs so they can speed up your workflow, too.

All generative AI tools do carry a risk of inaccuracies, though, so you’ll want to make sure to double-check ChatGPT’s outputs before using them or feeding information back into another market research tool.

Who Should Use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can be a useful tool for anyone conducting market research manually, whether that involves sorting through data, writing questions, or segmenting audiences to survey.

How Much Does ChatGPT Cost?

It's free to use ChatGPT, though you may run into some feature limitations. You'll also have to use a slightly older version of the GPT AI, which can lead to more errors.

To customize your experience and get more tools for document analysis, you'll need a ChatGPT Plus plan starting at $20 per month.

16. Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop is a user experience (UX) research tool.

The platform facilitates research, data collection, and data visualization through:

• Card sort tests
• First click tests

Card sort tests are the most useful for teams interested in gathering market research data. By presenting a sample audience with examples of products and categories—and then asking them to group and rank each item—you can get a sense of:

• What your target audience is and is not interested in
• How your potential customers think about products and categories of items
• Whether certain colors, terms, and images are more appealing than others

You could run these card sort tests with actual products that you sell or with ones you’re considering creating or adding to your inventory.

Who Should Use Optimal Workshop?

Marketers and business leaders can use Optimal Workshop’s card sort tests to evaluate how members of a new market or audience think about products—and what their preferences are.

How Much Does Optimal Workshop Cost?

Optimal Workshop plans start at $191 per user, per month (billed annually), with a minimum of three users. Because of this, it’s best suited for organizations that plan to conduct UX research after moving through market research and card testing.

17. AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked is a tool that produces frequently asked questions on any topic.

The way it works is simple—type in a phrase, set your language and location, and see related questions that people are typing into search engines.

Questions display in tree format, so you can see how different queries relate to each other. One click on any group of questions opens up a new tree, so you can dig down even further into related subtopics.

Who Should Use AlsoAsked?

AlsoAsked is useful for anyone who’s conducting preliminary market research. Because you can adjust results by location and language, you can use AlsoAsked to get a feel for:

• What people want to know about a topic, product, or service
• Whether their questions increase, decrease, or change based on location
• How a market’s concerns, interests, and queries change along with language

You won’t be able to do all of your market research in AlsoAsked, but it can give you ideas for survey questions to ask, industry trends to track, and more.

How Much Does AlsoAsked Cost?

AlsoAsked is free to use, though you’re limited to three searches per day. To raise usage limits, bring up increasingly detailed results, and unlock multiple export formats, you’ll need a paid plan. Options start at $12 per month when billed annually.

If you’re new to the market research process, then these tools will help you set benchmarks, get key consumer insights, and collect data for decision making. But even the best market research tool can only go so far—you also need to have a solid understanding of the research process and key industry shifts.

To make sure that you’re getting the most out of your preferred research solution, check out our guide to conducting research for new product development —and look at the biggest trends in market research happening right now.

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The 19 Best Market Research Tools Of 2024

Market research is a crucial component of any business strategy. Here are some of the best tools you can use in your market research efforts.

Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.

That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy .

Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.

But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?

In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.

Let’s get started.

1. SurveyMonkey

One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.

Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.

It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.

• SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 25 responses per survey.
• Individual plans start at $1169/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
• Team plans start at $920/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.

2. Typeform

Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.

With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.

Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.

The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.

• Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
• Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
• The company also offers an Enterprise plan.

3.  BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.

Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.

The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.

• 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Membership tiers start at $199/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $299/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $499/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.

4. Qualaroo

Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.

Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.

The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.

Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.

• 15-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.

SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.

It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.

You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.

Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.

• SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $39/month for Basic, $79/month for Professional.

Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.

Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.

With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.

• Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
• Paid plans start at $129/month for Lite, $249/month for Standard, $449/month for Advanced, and $14,990/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

7. Delve AI

User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.

Thanks to tools like Delve AI , it’s easier than ever to build user personas.

Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:

• Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
• Social personas based on your social audience.
• Customer personas using your customer information.
• Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.

Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.

• The company offers a free Lite plan.
• Business plans start at $89/month for Standard, $199/month for the Growth tier, and $549/month for Pro (billed annually).
• Agency plans start at $209/month for Standard, $429/month for Growth, and $859/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).

8. Sprout Social

We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.

Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.

It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.

• Free 30-day trial.
• Plans start at $199/month for Standard, $299/month for Professional, and $399/month for Advanced.
• Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.

9. Google Trends

How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.

Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.

By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.

It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.

10. Statista

If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.

It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.

From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.

• Free Basic account available.
• Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $549/month for Personal (billed annually), $959 for Professional (billed annually) with more options available.

11. Qualtrics

If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics ’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.

It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:

• Panel Management : Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
• On-Demand Respondents : Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
• Product Development : Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
• Purchase Behavior : Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.

While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.

• Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
• For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.

It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.

The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.

You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.

• Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
• Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.

You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora , but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?

Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.

It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.

Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!

It’s a great tool for engaging your audience , keeping an eye on your competitors, and even developing new ideas for content, product development, and more.

• Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.

14. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.

It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.

You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.

• Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
• Paid options start at $99/month for Pro (billed annually).
• An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.

15. Google Market Finder

Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder . This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.

There are two primary features within Market Finder:

• Test your export readiness.  By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
• Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.

Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.

16. Semrush

Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.

The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.

You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.

• Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
• Paid accounts start at $139.95/month for Pro, $249.95/month for Guru, and $499.95/month for Business (billed annually).

17. Pew Research Center

While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.

The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.

You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.

18. Exploding Topics

We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics , your business can be the one to say this.

Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.

You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.

It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.

• Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
• Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).

In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?

You can use Loop11 , a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.

Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.

It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.

• Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
• Paid plans start at $179-199/month for Rapid Insights, $358-399/month for Pro, and $533-599/month for Enterprise (price depending on whether it’s billed monthly or annually).

Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.

From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.

And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.

More Resources: 

• How To Calculate Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) For SEO
• Market Intelligence: What It Is & How To Use It
• Competitor Mapping: What Is It & How To Do It

Featured Image: LAONG/Shutterstock

Writer, digital marketer, and content strategist. Annabelle has 8+ years of experience in social marketing, copywriting, and storytelling for best-in-class ...

19 best market research software tools for 2024

Last updated

25 March 2024

Reviewed by

Whether you're marginally satisfied with your current market research software or are venturing out to find your first software option, keep reading. In this article, we'll share some of the best market research tools available for 2023. Based on user reviews, affordability, and efficiency, these are the top considerations your company should look into for market research software.

Market analysis template

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

• Different types of market research software

Since there are several types of market research, there are different types of market research software solutions. Before you begin your hunt for the best-fit software, recognize what type of market research you do most.

Determine which metrics are the most valuable to your company. Work out if this key data is best gathered via a consumer survey, questionnaire , interview, or checklist form. From there, you can begin to look for various market research software options offering features and calculations that make the most sense for your needs.

Decide which types of market research matter to you, each requiring its own tools and methods:

Primary market research

Secondary market research

Quantitative research

Qualitative research

Branding research

Competitor research

Customer or client research

Product research

• Uses of market research software

As you evaluate your market research software options, start by reviewing each tool's strengths and core uses. Then, look at each through the lens of these four steps, checking how well they perform at each stage. This will also form your process when it comes to using them.

1. Identify the target audience

Know your target audience first. This might be a data pool of prospects based on your buyer personas . But it might also be an unknown segment of people if you’re conducting market research on a new region or for a new offering.

The ideal market research software will provide insights to help you identify your target audience in any scenario.

2. Create a research questionnaire

Market research software should have the capability of creating research questionnaires . These surveys are instrumental in learning more about a particular audience segment , region, or market dynamic.

3. Share your research questionnaire

Creating your market surveys and research-related questionnaires is one thing. You'll also need to share those questionnaires with participants. A great market research software tool will have additional layers of features to help you send and receive surveys.

4. Collect data and create information

A great market research software tool will also help you collect data and create usable insights from those metrics. You'll need a seamless way to gather market information and disseminate it throughout your organization in an actionable, effective way.

• Benefits of using market research software

When you harness the right market research software, prepare for some significant advantages. Automation alone makes data analytics faster. But your datasets will also be more accurate when you use software to collect and share insights.

As an added benefit for companies, researchers, and organizations, using market research software means easier report generation and the ability to spot trends and patterns in your collected data.

The bottom line: market research software tools will help you keep up with consumer behavior trends and market fluctuations, allowing you to capitalize on emerging shifts and changes.

• 19 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Based on industry reviews, effectiveness, and available features, these market research platforms and tools deserve a look. When accurate data and analysis matter, these are the solutions to have in your toolbox.

Take advantage of free trial periods and start evaluating your research tool and dashboard options.

Keep these top software solutions on your roster of must-try tools, and you'll be able to keep up with whatever's happening in your market.

Software strengths:

Precision accuracy in transcription with an advanced speech engine

Custom fields for structured data

Importable datasets

Sentiment analysis

Project templates

Access control and unlimited viewership capabilities

Flexible and customizable editing

Another market research tool worth exploring is  Qualtrics . This software solution can help you draft surveys, analyze captured data, and run statistical testing.

Qualtrics also provides a representative sample of recipients if you don't already have an audience segmented.

In addition, the platform includes training on demand if your teams need help navigating it.

Easy to create and facilitate survey processes

Top-notch dataset reporting

Ability to boost your survey audience

QuestionPro

If you want survey customization and ultimate flexibility,  QuestionPro  is a great market research tool. It uses survey logic tech to seamlessly adjust the survey in real time based on participant responses.

Choose from a variety of software plans, most of which are ideal for creating, sharing, and analyzing collected metrics.

There's also 24/7 live chat for ongoing support.

Easy to navigate and customize

The free plan is fairly robust

Analysis can be exported or carried out in the app

If you prefer visual data, such as graphs showing statistics and market research-related reports, you'll like  Statista .

Statista continuously uploads data, so you can check back on the same charts and see real-time shifts in trends. It's a good resource for consumer behavior insights and covers a broad range of market topics.

Considered one of the best statistics resources

Easy to use and navigate

Hundreds of reports and dashboards available

If your organization needs a more advanced customer survey tool and market research solution,  Qualaroo  is a great option.

The main difference between Qualaroo and other market research tools is that its surveys can be directly embedded into your website or landing page. You can catch and attract participants in real time, which makes their survey responses more valuable.

There are AI analytics tools built in, too, with plenty of features for customizing your questionnaires.

Easy to create, embed, and send surveys

Super-fast reporting turnaround capabilities

Auto language translation

Another piece of market research software worth considering is  Typeform . Explore pre-made templates in an entirely user-friendly platform. Typeform makes creating and customizing forms and surveys a breeze, especially with all the available templates.

Unlike other survey tools, Typeform only sends one question at a time, making it a participant-friendly format.

Explore Typeform as a research software tool for qualitative and quantitative data .

Brilliant visualization of your data

Mobile-optimized

Compatible with hundreds of other apps

SurveyMonkey

Nearly anyone in research or business has heard of  SurveyMonkey . It's another market research solution worth looking into, especially if you need access to 200+ survey templates for inspiration.

This platform is a breeze to navigate, much like Typeform. SurveyMonkey is more of an enterprise-grade dashboard, however, simplifying the process of creating, sending, and analyzing for all your metrics.

Easy for anyone to use

Custom reports available

Robust free plan

If you're looking for a social media marketing research tool with content marketing research features, check out  BuzzSumo . Its software will scrub and analyze billions of articles and trillions of social media engagements, assembling metrics about relevant topics, influencer targeting, and popular trends.

These types of metrics are helpful in any marketing endeavors and content creation. They’re also key in understanding the driving factors of your target consumers.

Accuracy with social sharing metrics

Ideal for competitive research

Ability to monitor mentions

Google Trends

One of the most popular market research tools, firstly because it's Google and secondly because it's free, is  Google Trends . It's not as comprehensive as some of the other tools, but it can be helpful in your research objectives.

Find topics that are popular online or review line graphs that rank widely used terms and keywords. This tool is less about conducting surveys and more about carrying out your own online research and active listening.

Discovering keywords, including long-tail keywords

Find hot-topic conversations to inspire your marketing

Visually appealing and easy to use

Bonus list of market research software tools

While the above market research tools tend to land at the top of the favorites list, there are other solutions worth considering. These are all great tools and platforms to dive into.

Evaluate the features and choose those that align best with the data you're trying to collect and analyze.

Tableau: Business intelligence suite for connecting virtually any data source

Paperform: Free-text interface and customizable surveys for all your personas

Claritas MyBestSegment: Great for digging into demographics and lifestyle habits

Upwave Instant Insights: Distributes surveys to real people, not including paid participants

Userlytics: Test prototypes, mobile apps, or website user experience and opinions

NielsenIQ: Great for evaluating product launch-related market research and data

Loop11: Test website usability and user experience metrics with your participants

Ubersuggest: Keyword and content research tool, great for competitive advantage insights

BrandMentions: Social media monitoring software and platform

Pew Research Center: Gather data regarding social media usage, political sentiments, and economic conditions

• How to choose the right market research software

The market research software tools listed in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. You'll find all kinds of innovative tools with shiny new capabilities worth exploring.

What may be more helpful is a short to-do list outlining how to go about choosing the right research market platform for your project or company. Keep these objectives in mind as you decide to adopt or upgrade your software solutions.

Know your market research objectives

Be mindful of your budget

Evaluate the ease of use for you and your teams

Look for robust data collection features

Look for analytics capabilities

Choose those that integrate with other apps and software

When evaluating the best tools, create and reference your objectives, so you know you'll make the best-fit decision.

What are examples of research tools used today?

Some of the most common market research tools used today include surveys, interviews, checklists, and questionnaires. While the methods have been around for decades, the software used to facilitate and manage these strategies has improved using technology, algorithms, and automation.

What are the four Ps of market research?

When you hear about the four Ps of market research, researchers typically mean the four categories worth researching in a particular market: price, place, product, and promotion.

Why are the different types of market research important?

Because the consumer market, or your target audience, is constantly changing how it makes decisions, interacts with brands, buys products or services, and makes recommendations to others, market research is your first line of defense in keeping up with those changes. Finding the right market research software tool will determine how effectively you collect, share, and act on those emerging shifts in consumer behavior.

The only way to stay ahead in today's consumer product and service landscape is with superior intel. And the best way to learn the very latest about industry shifts, changes in customer behavior, and user preferences is with market research. Today's market research software tools make it easy and efficient to collect all kinds of metrics and apply those insights to effect organizational or core-offering changes.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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17 Market research tools you should be using

From trawling the mighty US Census, to calculating percent change in an instant, there’s a whole lot of research tools out there to help you do your job as a market researcher. When you’re conducting market research , the obvious tool you need is a world-class research platform. But let’s look at some other tools to help you create the best possible experience for your customers and employees.

Here are 17 of the best.

1. Pew Research Center

Insightful, rigorous and transparent data. This is what you can expect from The Pew Research Center , a non-profit organization that conducts research and analysis across a diverse range of areas. These include:

• US politics and policy
• Public opinion polling
• Social and demographic trends
• News and media
• Technology and the internet
• Hispanic interest
• Global interest

More specific topics of interest and research include:

• Social media
• Online privacy
• Broadband access
• IoT (the internet of things)

2. Growthbar

(Free Trial)

The quickest and easiest way to perform market research has to be GrowthBar. The tool allows you to do market research on the fly -- instantly unlocking critical data points about your competitors or any website and the growth channels and keywords that are working for them. This data will help you identify what others in your space are doing as well as identify which marketing channels may work to grow your own business.

See the following data for any website:

• Domain Authority
• Organic Traffic
• Top Organic Keywords
• Top Paid Keywords
• Top Backlinks
• Suggested Keywords
• Keyword Search Volume

Take actionable next steps to compete with the market by creating content that ranks fast, utilizing their powerful Open AI technology. Enter any keyword and instantly get a content outline that tells you exactly what to write to optimize for SEO. You can also pair this tool up with Sitechecker Link Extractor that helps you extract all the links from your target website to see who they're linking to.

3. Living Facts

Described as the Pew Research Center’s sister site, and created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Living Facts has the simple strapline, ‘about Americans today—who we are and how we live. Our goal is to inform and inspire. That’s it.’

With clean, colorful design and infographics, and chock-full of statistics, educational quizzes and fascinating facts, Living Facts covers:

• Communities
• Demographics

4. US Census Business Data

There’s nothing to top the data to be found in the US Census when it comes to free market research . Start with Data Gems , videos that explain how to access census data to inform your business decisions.

Then dive into the data, with useful tools that cover:

• Economics : the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis
• Money Statistics from the Federal Reserve banks.
• Income : Earnings by Occupation and Education and Income Statistics .
• The labor market : Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Industries : North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.

5. Sample Size Calculator

You need to create surveys for a number of people so that they are representative of your target audience, but you don’t know how many. What do you do? Use our sample size calculator .

• confidence level
• population size
• margin of error

and it’ll calculate the sample size you’ll need within seconds.

6. Google Keyword Tool

Where eyes are the window to the soul, Google Keywords are the window to the web. Google’s keyword tool is very popular as it accesses the best data – Google’s.

To start you will need to create a free AdWords account to access all the results.

This Google tool shows you:

• the volume of keyword searches
• how competitive those keywords are
• how keywords are related to each other

You’ll also be able to

• limit your keyword searches to a language or geographical area
• limit searches to only those on mobile devices
• filter results by your chosen criteria

7. Qualtrics Panels

( Contact us for a demo and quote)

It’s hard work finding the right respondents for your surveys, and a survey that no one takes is pretty useless. When you deploy our panel team, you’ll get access to hundreds of thousands of opt-in survey respondents, both B2B and B2C, who are already vetted and qualified. When our team handles your research project, you’ll be able to:

• choose any target audience and access a representative sample
• boost the accuracy of your tracking studies sampling that’s 47% more consistent than standard sampling methods
• get support for your best-in-class study at every stage, from survey launch to results reporting

8. Social Mention

Would you like to know what everyone’s saying about your brand? Social Mention scours more than 100 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, videos and images for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you wish to input. Then, it gives them to you in a single information feed.

You’ll get four key metrics:

• Strength : How much your keywords crop up on social media.
• Sentiment : Positive vs. negative mentions
• Passion : How many people are repeatedly talking about your keywords.
• Reach : Range of influence, i.e, how many individual users are mentioning your keywords.

9. Google Trends

While Google Trends has some crossover with Social Mention, it has the added feature of factoring in data from the Google search engine in addition to social platforms.

Google Trends:

• Shows how frequently your search term is entered into Google compared with the site’s total search volume over a specific period of time.
• Provides keyword-related and geographic data about Google’s users.
• Can be used for comparative keyword research and to uncover keyword spikes triggered by events.
• Gives you a more comprehensive perspective on the news, opinions, posts and perceptions affecting your brand.

10. Think with Google

This tool will give you all the information you need for uncovering market trends, understanding consumer behavior and gaining market insights, ready for your product launch. You’ll find everything from high-level insights to deck-ready statistics and useful marketing tools.

Using fascinating and useful content from Google, using data from their digital searches, Think with Google will inform your marketing campaigns by:

• Making sense of the data with articles that explain its implications
• Highlighting trends in real time
• Showing what other companies have achieved

11. Facebook Audience Insights

With around 2.45 billion monthly active users , marketers are missing a trick if they don’t track social media giant Facebook for marketing purposes. And Facebook Audience Insights will give you information about two groups:

• People connected to your Facebook page
• People on Facebook generally

These will help you create and target content, and find more people who match your target audience. You’ll also be able to extract:

• Demographic information : age, gender, job titles education, relationship status
• What people like : hobbies, interests, pastimes
• Lifestyles : location and relationship status combine to identify the types of people interacting with your business.

12. R Studio

Sometimes it just feels good to get your hands dirty romping through raw data.

• R is free language and environment software for stats computing, data manipulation and graphics, and you’ll need to install it first.
• R Studio gives you a range of statistical analysis tools to use with R. It requires that you know some coding, but it gives you tremendous power to create custom statistical analysis. RStudio is a free, open-source integrated development environment, which means it’s constantly being improved by the data-analysis community that uses it.

13. Stats iQ

( Book a Stats iQ demo )

Stats iQ may be the polar opposite to R Studio because you can do hardcore stats analysis without needing to be a hardcore stats wonk. It’s the world’s most powerful statistical analysis tool , that also happens to be the world’s easiest.

Stats iQ automatically:

• finds relationships in your data
• shows how strong those relationships are
• runs the right statistical tests and visualizations
• translates your results into simple language that anyone can put into action.

14. Make My Persona

Every marketer knows that buyer personas help your business focus time and resources, and inform product development and marketing. A buyer persona is a model of an ideal customer, created through market research and existing customer data.

Make My Persona helps you create these semi-fictitious characters in seven simple steps that you fill in, including:

• Job responsibilities
• Goals or objectives
• Preferred method of communication
• Biggest challenges
• Anything else you want to include

The tool then gives you a profile of your buyer persona that you can share with your whole organization to inform and inspire.

15. Percent Change Calculator

You use percent change to track change over time – e.g. the fluctuations of sales, subscriptions, or prices of financial securities.

For example, you sold 15,000 bicycles this year, and 9,000 last year. You want to know the percent change of your sales:

15,000 (new number) – 9,000 (old number) = 6,000

6,000 x 100 = 66.66666

You’ve sold 67% more bicycles this year.

But do you want to do this calculation every time? No! Put your two values into a simple percent change calculator and it will do the math for you.

16. AMZScout

(Free trial. Prices start at $14.99 per month)

When it comes to understanding what is happening in a market, there is no data more useful than sales numbers. AMZScout is an innovative eCommerce software that provides sellers with the insights they need to identify items that have high profit potential.

With AMZScout you can:

• Get stats for every product, including average monthly sales, reviews, sales history, and more.
• Review demand and competition levels for both products and niches.
• Predict costs and profit margins.
• Track seasonal trends and consumer behavior.

This leads to unexpected product discoveries, significant new customer flows,  efficient market insights, and long-term revenue growth.

17. Tableau

( Prices start at $70 per month for 1 creator, rising to $278 per month for a team.)

Tableau is a tool for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. It helps you see and understand your market research data pictorially, using analytics, visualization and business intelligence .

It works like this:

• It extracts data from PDFs, Excel, text, R, Hadoop, Python or SAS, to cloud databases.
• The Tableau desktop takes the data, analyses it, then presents it as an interactive and shareable dashboard which shows trends and variations with colorful charts and tables.
• The data can be published, with features such as collaboration and automation included.
• Users can view their visualized data on platforms such as email, mobile and desktop.

Did we miss your favorite market research tool ? Let us know by tweeting us @Qualtrics

Use our market research tool for free

Aaron Carpenter // Experience Management Content Strategist

Aaron is a highly skilled and accomplished content strategist specializing in experience management. With a keen understanding of the ever-evolving landscape of digital content, Aaron brings a unique perspective to the art of crafting engaging and impactful experiences for users.

Ruth D'Alessandro

Ruth has been writing digital content for many years. She’s fascinated by what big data and artificial intelligence can bring to the human experience, and loves writing about it for Qualtrics.

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