Market research is important for business success. A market research report shows that the global market research industry is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of around 5% through 2022.
There’s no question that the market research tools you choose can make or break the success of your business. Businesses spend an estimated $41 billion on market research each year and are expected to spend about $73 billion on market research by 2026.
The best market research tools help businesses gather competitive intelligence, analyze consumer trends and preferences, and track customer satisfaction and product quality. In this article, we look at what market research is, why it’s so important for business success, and how to choose the best market research software for your business.
As a business owner, your goal is to make data-driven decisions that will increase revenue. To do so, you need access to accurate, current market research.
But where can you find reliable and relevant information on your target audience? Fortunately, there are plenty of market research tools at your disposal.
These apps are specifically designed to help you gather and analyze the data you need to make informed decisions about your business.
Best Market Research Tools
What Are Market Research Tools
A market research tool is a software application or website that helps you gather data from your customers and analyze it.
Market research tools help you collect data from your customer base, but you also need to know how to interpret the data and present it in a meaningful way so that you can make informed decisions.
There are many different types of market research tools, but they all have one thing in common: they help you get information about your target audience so that you can improve the experience for your customers.
You can use market research tools to examine any aspect of your business from its products and services to its marketing strategies and customer service policies and find out what works best for your target audience.
Market Research Tools – Introduction
It’s important to identify and study your target market before you begin selling products, because if you don’t understand the customers in your market, then you won’t be able to sell to them effectively.
Even though it takes some time and effort, researching your target audience will help you increase sales and profits in the long run. The first step to conducting an effective market research study is to identify the goals of your business.
Knowing what information you need – and why – will help guide your research process. For example, if you are trying to figure out whether or not a specific product will sell, then the questions on your survey should focus on consumer demand for that product or service.
If you have an existing business and want to expand into a new location or demographic, then it would be wise to ask about consumer needs and preferences within that area. There are many different ways to do market research, so it’s important that you find one that works best for your business.
You can conduct surveys online with survey software such as SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics; interview potential customers face-to-face at events like fairs or trade shows.
What Are the Best Market Research Tools?
A market is a place where you can buy and sell things. A market research is the gathering of data and information about the particular market.
Here are some of the best market research tools:
Google Trends – Google Trends is a tool for people to discover search trends and get a view of how often specific search terms have been entered over time. Google Trends also gives a glimpse of geographical interest in certain topics.
Google Keyword Tool – This tool helps to manage pay-per-click campaigns, search engine optimization, and website traffic. It allows marketers to discover keywords for advertising on Google Adwords or other ad networks.
SEMRush – It is one of the best SEO tools that help marketers to analyze their competitors’ performance in SEO, PPC, and content marketing. SEMRush provides analytics into competitors’ strategies, so marketers can use this information to improve their own marketing efforts.
SurveyMonkey – It is an online service that allows its users to create online surveys and send them out via social media platforms, email lists, etc., and then analyze the results.
Keywordtool.io – It is one of the most comprehensive keyword research tools that support up to 750 million keywords from Google Autocomplete in all languages and countries.
1. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a global survey software company based in San Mateo, California, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley, Chris Finley and Tim Eades.
SurveyMonkey’s platform enables anyone to create surveys, run surveys and analyze their data. The company offers a number of subscription plans for individuals and businesses.
Features
- Templates: Get started quickly with dozens of survey templates or use our template library to build your own.
- Question Library: Choose from over 150 question types, customize them, and fit them in any order.
- Analytics: View results for real-time reporting and export your data for further analysis.
- Export Data: At any time, you can download your survey data into Excel for more in-depth analysis.
- Skip Logic: Show respondents questions based on how they answer previous questions, ensuring a more relevant experience for every respondent.
- Custom Themes: Customize your survey’s look and feel with pre-built themes or create your own.
- Survey Links: Create a personal survey link to share your survey via email or social media. You can also embed your survey on a website or blog with one click.
Pros
- Exclusive discounts on software, services and events for survey creators and respondents
- A chance to get your survey featured on SurveyMonkey’s homepage
- A platform to connect with other survey creators and respondents
2. Google Trends
Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.
The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. Queries with higher volumes of searches are represented by colors closer to red, whereas queries with lower search volumes are represented by colors closer to blue.
Features
Google Trends allows you to explore search trends by category, region, time period and more. Search interests Search interest is a measure of relative popularity over time.
Topics: In addition to keywords, you can also explore topics. Topics are pre-defined groups of keywords that make it easy to explore trends across related concepts rather than searching for specific keywords one at a time.
You can find topics by clicking on the topic icon next to a keyword in a related topic section or using our commands feature (if available). Topics are available only for some locations and languages.
Regions :You can search by country or state/province.
Pros
- Determining trends for your business
- Creating marketing content
- Search for keywords
- Discover new markets
- You can use Google Trends to see how often a particular term has been searched for on Google over a period of time. The tool also displays related searches and regional interest.
Google Trends is trends search feature that shows the popularity of a search term in Google.
3. Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. Social Mention monitors more than 100 social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.
Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
Features
Social Mention features: Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
Get a quick glance of how often your keyword has been mentioned on the web. See where and how it has been used across the web.
Find out what people are saying about you. Monitor if people are talking positively or negatively about you. Discover the sentiment of the web regarding any topic of your choice.
Social Mention is a search engine that seeks and analyzes user-generated content across the whole world by aggregating it into a single stream of information.
4. Qualtrics
The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organizations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand—on one platform.
Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.
The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action that helps businesses to attract customers who stay longer and buy more, to engage and empower employees to do the best work of their lives, to develop breakthrough products people love, and to build a brand people can’t imagine living without.
Features
- Smart Survey Logic: Use logic to ask the right follow-up questions or send respondents in different directions based on their answers.
- Respondent Browsing: Our respondent browsing panel gives you a wealth of information about your respondents including time on survey, time on page, and IP address.
- Advanced Piping: Make your survey feel more conversational by personalizing the questions for your respondents using our advanced piping feature.
- User Permissions: Qualtrics allows you to set permissions for individual users, so you’re always in control of who sees what.
- Beautiful Reporting: Our reporting tool lets you turn raw data into professional-looking reports.
- API Integration: Use our API to integrate Qualtrics with other software programs.
- Unlimited Surveys and Questions: We don’t limit the number of surveys or questions that you can create. Create as many as you need!
Pros
- Adding your Company Logo
- Adding images to your email
- Html editor for text and images
- Sending test emails before sending out to all your contacts
Qualtrics is a powerful online survey tool that allows one to build surveys, distribute surveys and analyze responses from one convenient online location! It's available to all faculty, staff and students at CSULB.
5. Statista
The Statista Global Consumer Survey is a unique source of information on consumer markets. It provides the latest retail sales data, allowing you to identify the sectors driving growth.
It identifies the leading companies, the leading brands and offers strategic analysis of key factors influencing the market – be they new product developments, distribution or pricing issues. Forecasts illustrate how the market is set to change.
The Market Reports provide detailed industry analysis and five-year forecasts, with special focus on the underlying structure and external forces and relationships that affect industries and their performance.
Report contents include:
- Market size and characteristics
- Key statistics and ratios
- Current performance
- Competitive landscape
Pros
- Dashboards with individualized statistics.
- New content added daily.
- No download required.
Statista provides information on software market spending in general and on various software products specifically, on both global and regional scales.
6. Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence platform that provides data visualization solutions for small, medium and large businesses. It allows users to analyze data and create interactive charts, stories, dashboards and other visualizations.
Tableau can be used to analyze and visualize trends in data. This data can be presented in the form of graphs, charts and other visuals.
Tableau can also help detect data patterns and anomalies that may not have been immediately apparent with a quick glance at the raw data. Tableau’s software applications are available both on-premise and in the cloud.
Features
Businesses can use Tableau to understand their consumer base better through the analysis and visualization of customer data. Tableau allows businesses to gather consumer insights which can be used to develop better products and marketing strategies as well as improve customer service.
Tableau integrates with a range of different databases including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, Hadoop Hive and many others. It also integrates with popular services such as Salesforce, Google Analytics and Marketo.
Platforms: Web Features
Tableau’s enterprise-ready analytics platform is used by people in all industries to connect to data, share discoveries, and create compelling data visualizations.
Connect to virtually any data source
Tableau connects easily to almost any data source, including spreadsheets and cloud apps like Salesforce.
Tableau Online makes it even easier for you to share your work securely—anyone with a web browser can view your work.
Visualize your data
Tableau’s drag and drop interface makes it easy to visualize your data. Choose from a variety of charts and maps, or create your own custom visuals.
Share your discoveries
Share interactive dashboards online with Tableau Public. Use Tableau Server or Tableau Online to share dashboards securely with colleagues, partners, or customers.
Pros
Drag-and-drop functionality lets you create visualizations quickly. If you want to present your data in a bar graph, for example, you can simply drag and drop the data into the chart.
You can then format the chart using a variety of color and layout options. This feature makes Tableau user-friendly for people who aren’t familiar with spreadsheets or charts.
It’s easy to connect big data sources and visualize data in real time.
You can link your business’s databases directly to Tableau so you can see the most current information and spot trends as they happen. This is particularly useful for companies that rely on customer feedback or are looking to improve their customer service efforts.
The online community has thousands of members sharing ideas, code, and custom visualizations. This means you don’t have to be an expert in coding or statistics to use Tableau; you can simply download someone else’s work and make it your own.
Additionally, if you have a problem or question about how to use Tableau, there are many forums where you can get answers from other users.
Tableau is an interactive, self-service reporting and analytics tool that enables faculty and staff to integrate and combine data from multiple sources into visualizations and be accessed in a single Creator environment using Tableau Creator or through a shared dashboard.
7. Typeform
Features
- Choose from our range of question types to learn more about them: Multiple choice Short text answers
- Longer text answers
- Rating scales (stars) Dropdown menus (choose one)
- Legal agreement
- Yes/No questions Likert scales (numbers)
Pros
More templates.
Choose from over 50 premium templates to help you wow respondents (and yourself) with your forms and surveys.
More question types.
Our Advanced plan includes all of our question types, like Opinion Scale, Rating, or Payment—plus we add new ones every month! You’ll also get access to Custom Variables, so you can track a user’s progress in your typeforms and personalize them to each respondent.
More flexibility.
With Typeform Pro you can create unlimited typeforms, collect unlimited responses, and customize your theme with CSS for a truly unique look and feel. Plus, we have an amazing Customer Success Manager ready to answer any questions you have about our product along the way
Typeform is a cloud-based survey management solution designed for companies of all sizes. It offers survey design, configuration, distribution and analytics within a suite.
What is Market Research?
Market research is a way companies find out about their potential customers and the marketplace. Market research helps companies market their products and services more effectively by providing valuable information about what customers want or need.
Companies use market research to better understand who their customers are and what their needs are. The information gathered from market research can help a company determine how much demand there is for its product or service, which consumers to target, how to make a product or service more appealing to consumers, and whether consumers believe the price of a product or service is fair.
Market research is a way of getting an overview of consumers’ wants, needs and beliefs. It can also involve discovering how they act. The research can be used to determine how a product could be marketed.
Why Is Market Research Important?
Market research is a vital part of business planning. By gathering information about your customers, target audience and competitors you can make informed decisions about your business strategy.
The market research process involves three steps:
1. Identify your market research needs.
2. Gather the data
3. Analyze the results
Market research can be used to:
- Determine if there’s a market for your product or service
- Identify your target customers
- Discover how much customers are willing to pay for your products or services
- Understand how to price your products or services
- Learn who your competitors are and how you measure up against them
- Explore how to promote and distribute your products or services
- Develop marketing campaigns that are effective in reaching your target audience
- Market research is important because it can help you learn about your potential customers’ needs, wants and desires.
- It also helps you discover how you can best reach customers with your marketing efforts.
- Knowing what your customers look for in a product or service and what’s important to them when making a purchase decision will help you determine: Whether people are likely to buy your product or service.
Market Research Tools – Frequently Asked Questions
Market research is a way to get an overview of consumers’ wants, needs and beliefs. It can also involve discovering how they act. The research can be used to determine how a product could be marketed.
Primary research attempts to gather data directly from participants in the study — usually by asking them questions face-to-face or via email, phone or social media messages. This type of data collection can provide detailed information on a specific topic, but it’s also more expensive than secondary market research.
Secondary research uses existing data that has been previously gathered for another purpose than what you’re currently trying to find out about. Secondary market research includes information like statistics, magazines and books related to your target audience’s likes, dislikes
Market Research – Frequently Asked Questions
Market research can help you get accurate information about your customers, your competitors, and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. In this guide, we’ll help you understand the basics of market research.
What is market research?
Market research is a way to get an overview of consumers’ wants, needs and beliefs. It also helps companies gather feedback about their products and services, and explains how customers feel about their offerings.
Why is market research important for businesses?
Market research helps companies understand what products people want, who will buy them, and at what price.
How do I conduct market research for my business?
You can do market research in several ways, including: Searching online yourself or hiring someone to do so (e.g., through a service such as Upwork). Creating and sending surveys to your customers (e.g., with SurveyMonkey Audience).
Checking out your competition by visiting their locations and reviewing their online presence (website, social media profiles, etc.). Interviewing people to learn more about their habits and preferences (qualitative research).
For example, if you are selling a product that depends on certain weather conditions (such as sunscreen), you might ask people how often they use it when they
Best Market Research Tools – Summary
This is a list of the best market research tools for conducting your own surveys and analyzing survey results. It’s not comprehensive.
It focuses on those tools I think are best suited to companies that do not have access to the resources of large market research departments.
I’ve included only those tools I think are best suited to companies that do not have access to the resources of large market research departments. Focused Surveys on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks.
