You can use brand and market research tools to help you understand your customers and discover new ones.
Although you may believe you have all the information about your target audience, without data backing it up, your intuition can lead you down the wrong road.
Market research involves identifying your potential customers, their needs, and how to reach them. These tools might have included a phone, a clipboard, and a pen back in the day.
There are many smart data collection and analysis systems available. Where do you start?
Try it out! You’ll only know which option is best for your company if you try them all. While some tools are designed to meet all your needs, other tools can be more specific. It is best to have at least a few of these tools in your arsenal.
We’ve examined three types of tools: online listening, market intelligence, and customer interaction. Prices range from free to tens of thousands to enterprise-level commitments in their thousands.
These services can provide valuable insights for any size business, whether you are a startup or a large corporation. Let’s now take a look at the top ten creative market research tools that we have seen so far and talk about why you should try them.
Top 10 Market Research Tools And Software
1. Answer the Public
Answer The public is an online market research tool that allows you to find out the most common questions people are asking. The search page will display a list of common search terms and related topics when you enter your topic.
Let’s take “oat milk” as an example. You’ll find the following results among all of the many for this topic:
- “Where to use oat milk”
- “Which oat milk is best to give toddlers?”
- “will oat milk curdle”
- “Can you recycle oat milk containers?”
These might not be the topics you believe people need answers to, but they are the information that customers actually want. If you don’t answer their questions, they will find someone else.
This tool will provide insights that can be used to help develop new products and services. If the content market is something you are interested in, even better.
Search engines will be more likely to find content that addresses your customers’ needs. Once they have found your website, you can then bring them into your marketing funnel in any way you like.
Also read: How to Do Market Research: A Complete Guide
2. Think With Google
Although Google’s other services may be well-known, this one is not as well-known outside of data-driven marketing circles.
However, Think With Google offers a new way to look at data that will help marketers look for trends and stats.
Google Analytics is a better way to get real-time data than Think With Google. This is a popular tool that many marketers love. It’s also a little more targeted than Google Trends.
It is a free, curated resource database of facts and figures that you can use. It draws on Google’s extensive analytics data and human wisdom to give you information that is not available elsewhere.
Consumer insights and other features highlight the current state of commerce. While you can do specific searches, they may be more useful for creative inspiration than answering narrow queries.
YouTube’s Find My Audience tool, for example, can give interesting profiles of customer searches in different target market segments.
Both “affinity audiences” and “in-market audiences” can be viewed. These are buyer personas who have similar interests and habits to your offer.
Think With Google basically consists of a collection of market research tools all integrated into one platform. Take a look around to find the best fit for you.
3. Spyfu
Spyfu allows users to view the traffic that their competitors are getting.
You will be asked to enter the website address of your competitor when you visit their homepage. Spyfu will then provide general information about Spyfu’s traffic metrics, including where and how they get traffic.
It is also very useful for finding competitors based on overlaps in traffic.
You can also pay for additional features, but the free service still offers valuable information. You can use backlink checkers and keyword research to help you with your online marketing strategy.
It’s not intended to encourage plagiarism, despite the name. You must know the quality of your target audience to best serve them.
This will allow you to spot gaps in the market, and identify opportunities to improve or expand your product. It is definitely worth the effort.
4. Latana
Our platform provides high-quality insights that are based on reliable data. It also offers a simplified, automated survey tool to help you conduct market research. Latana brand monitoring software is simple to use but powerful.
Latana’s unique ingredient is its ability to understand how consumers perceive your brand, and how that changes over time. This can even be done for niche audiences.
Brands can use the audience segmentation feature to:
Zoom in on niche customers that your brand values
Analyze the audiences that work best for your competitors and determine where your brand can step in to fill the gap
Only focus your campaigns on those audiences that will help you grow your brand.
These insights are powered by mobile-optimized brand survey results that provide a seamless mobile user experience for respondents and ensure reliable and valid results. You can reach over 4 billion mobile users across more than 100 countries with them.
Maximum consumer information capture is the result. It is now simple, straightforward, and precise to understand the impact of your brand’s marketing. This is the type of market research that you will really enjoy.
5. BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo is one of the best market research tools that’s all about social media and content marketing. It can help you gain insight into what people are sharing, engaging with, sharing, and blogging about.
BuzzSumo focuses on performance metrics for content, such as how many shares a post receives or how many backlinks pages have. It’s the best way to discover the most popular content within your niche or industry.
You can analyze the data and create high-performing content that will go viral with your target audience.
BuzzSumo can be used to monitor social mentions of a topic and set up alerts regarding certain keywords or comments. This tool is great if you care about people’s opinions and want to share information they will appreciate.
6. Statista
Statista is a portal for market and consumer data that provides information on a wide range of industries worldwide.
Statista is easy to use — simply go to their website and do a search. You can search for hundreds of market research report and data visualizations as well as statistical dashboards that were created from many sources.
For example, “gluten-free goods” returns an abundance of reports about consumer activity in this product category over the past years. You can click on the results to access analytic dashboards, survey sources, as well as links to studies and other related topics.
It is a great way for you to get information on things such as consumer behavior, market trends and consumer opinions.
If you want to have access to more detailed data, you will need to create a paid account. The free tier can still be useful as a starting point.
7. Typeform
Typeform is a well-known primary tool for makrket research and offers an easy platform to create interactive forms and surveys online.
The main selling point of the site is its design-led aesthetic, which creates a pleasant user experience as they answer questions. Users are usually shown one question and answer at once, which is less intimidating than a full-blown survey that is presented in one go.
The templates included are also easy to use.
Typeform is a great tool for collecting feedback from customers — Whether it’s new ideas or opinions about the current experience. If your company collects large amounts of customer data, You can also view the analytics for qualitative responses that you have collected
Also read: What is Marketing Optimization and Why it’s Important
8. Otter.ai
Although it’s not what we would traditionally refer to as a market research tool Otter.ai should still be part of every marketer’s arsenal.
It is an AI-powered transcription tool for meetings and interviews. It listens to your talk in the background and then transcribes it into plain text. This is regardless of whether you are talking in person or remotely.
You get a digitalized conversation that can then be searched and stored in a database. It can also be scored on positive or neutral sentiment.
You’re missing out if you don’t speak directly with your customers. Interviewing your customers is a great way to get feedback about your product. Ask questions such as: What do you think? What new features would they like to see? What features would they tell their friends about your company?
These answers may not always be found in surveys or through social media engagement. Interviewing is a great addition to your market research toolkit. It will give you that human insight that broad demographic research cannot always provide.
9. Dimensions.ai
For anyone who wants to do scientific research to understand customers and provide the proper sourcing for their claims, Dimensions is your secret weapon:
Dimensions can be used as a search engine to find academic publications. Searching for “productivity of the pandemic” and “vegan food sales” will return papers, studies, and journals from universities around the globe.
This is a great resource for finding new information in mass psychology, macro-, and micro-economic trends, as well as trending topics. Pro Tip: Filter your search to “All OA”, which will give access to Open Access research. This is free and not paywalled.
It is free to access in your web browser. You can search for keywords related to your industry and filter the results to show only the most recent years. You’ll soon find a study to support your intuition or explain a trend that you have noticed.
When you find a result, click on it, Click “View PDF” and you will be taken to the file. If you wish to refer to it in your marketing campaigns, you can click on the “doi.org” link.
10. Yelp
Although Yelp isn’t designed for businesses that conduct market research, it’s an excellent resource to gather information and find out what customers want when they spend their money.
It is a search engine for local businesses and a review platform. It has a large archive of customer reviews and is one of the most trusted sources of opinions.
It can be a valuable way to see what your competition is doing right or wrong if you own a brick-and-mortar business.
You can also find useful insights on TripAdvisor (for destinations), Google Reviews (also for destinations), Steam (for video games), Metacritic, and Amazon (for consumer products).
This tactic can be extended by looking through Reddit and Quora as well as other forums related to your industry. These forums are a great way for potential customers to reach out directly, without the need to complete online surveys.
Review sites can provide valuable insight that will help you create your next marketing campaign and improve your customer experience.
Last Thoughts — Top Market Research Tools
These marketing research tools are a major upgrade for your everyday toolkit.
There are many market research tools available to help you find metrics, trends, and conversations. You must know where to look if you want to be a successful marketer and reach large numbers of customers.
You’re now ready to become a market research expert by having a variety of solutions at your disposal.
