Whether you are thinking of starting a new business or looking for product ideas to grow your business, market research is a crucial part of it.
And this is where you need market research tools to collect data and find answers to all the questions you have regarding your business.
Gone are the days when you have to handle bundles of survey papers to understand your target market’s needs and expectations.
In this digital world, there are plenty of market research tools that you can use to understand your consumers and deliver what they expect from you.
In this article, I’ll show you some of the best market research tools that can help you unbox your target market potential, and you’ll be able to accomplish a strong positioning for your business.
Ready? Let’s get started.
1. Google Trends – Free Trend Research Tool
Google Trends is a free market research tool that enables you to search for specific phrases, explore trends, etc., that have been popular. It also allows you to find quality keywords that you can use to improve your search visibility across Google.
For example, if you enter the term “buyer persona,” it will display a graph showing how the search term has gained interest, displaying the related topics and queries that match your search term.
It also displays the location in which your search term was popular, which will help target your niche audience.
How will Google Trends be useful for market research?
As Google Trends displays real-time data and the latest trends, you can easily find what will work best for your niche. In addition to that, you can quickly find what your customers are actively looking for in your niche, which will be highly helpful in making strategic business decisions.
Feature Highlights –
- It displays relative search volumes to understand how the particular search term will perform against the comparable terms.
- It enables you to filter the results based on region, time, categories, and web search.
- It enables you to conduct seasonal analysis to understand what your customers are actively seeking on those special days.
- You can easily monitor your competitor’s position by seeing how well they compete against you using the Google Trends Compare feature.
Pricing and Plans
It is entirely free to use. Search for Google trends in the search bar and start unlocking all the potentials that gear up your business in the target market.
2. Make My Persona – Free Persona Builder
The primary purpose of conducting market research is to identify your target customers and how your product/service aid in solving their pain points.
To accomplish this, you need to understand the characteristics or traits of customers and then decide whether they will be the best fit for your business.
This is where ‘Make My Persona’ comes into the picture. It is a simple yet powerful tool designed by Hubspot to create buyer personas with different possibilities, thus allowing you to hand over your products to the right set of customers in the market.
How will Make My Persona be useful for market research?
You cannot sell products/services of little or no value to your customers. To avoid this potential loss, you need to craft buyer personas to give you the complete picture of your target customers and how your product can help them improve their satisfaction levels.
By creating buyer personas, you can easily segment your customers based on different traits and deliver to them what suits them best. Also, developing buyer personas for market research will help you design products in the best way possible such that the outcome adds incredible value to your target customers.
Feature Highlights –
- It is very easy to customize as it offers many options to design your avatar.
- It offers a clear overview of your persona, and you can add additional information like goals/challenges, the preferred method of communication, responsibilities, etc.
- You can either save or download your buyer persona by entering all the required details, which will be helpful in your market research.
Pricing and Plans – It is a free market research tool offered by Hubspot.
3. Social Mention – Social Social Listening Tool
Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool with which you can analyze what your customers are actively conversing about you or your competitor across 100+ social media platforms.
With this tool, you can find who are all the key prospects talking about your brand, get a better understanding of how your customers perceive your products, and improve your brand reputation by responding to customers’ questions or comments.
To start the search, you need to enter the term you want. It can be the name of a brand, hashtag, or website URL, and you’ll be displayed with all mentions.
One of the exciting features that I love is that it offers sentiment analysis. It lets you understand whether your brand has earned a positive, negative, or neutral image in your customer’s minds. This helps you to discover the key aspects that have to be shaped in your brand, enabling you to gain a high online reputation on social media platforms.
How will Social Mention be helpful in your market research?
Only if you interact with your customers can you determine what they expect. But you can easily miss out on this as you’ll be immersed in the pool of notifications.
This is where Social Mentions come to the rescue. You’ll discover how potential customers across different social media platforms interact with your brand using this tool.
Mentions about your brand can be anything. It can be a complaint, review, feedback, etc. By tracking and monitoring these aspects, you can research, understand the major drawbacks and optimize your brand to offer the best solutions to the customers.
Feature Highlights –
- You can spy on your competitors, which gives you a clear insight into their strengths and weaknesses.
- It sends you instant email notifications every time your brand gets mentioned.
- It enables you to find key influencers you think will be the ideal fit for your brand.
- It provides detailed statistics to optimize your brand’s products/services to the next level.
Pricing and Plans – It offers a 7-day free trial and has three major pricing plans. The Growing Business Plan starts at $99/month, the Company plan for $299/month, and the Enterprise plan starts at $499/month.
4. Statista – Market Research Statistics Platform
If you have been an ardent market researcher, then you would have come across Statista. Statista is an online statistics portal that delivers comprehensive research insights about different industries, letting you visualize data from a global perspective.
It offers trending statistics, popular topics that matter, news, and reports covering the latest industry trends. You can visit their daily infographics section, which clearly illustrates the data in a graphical representation based on various topics.
Using Statista is relatively easy. You need to input the key term, and within a few seconds, the entire set of proven statistical data will be available right at your fingertips. You can also filter the search term based on location, giving you a deep understanding of your business’s target market.
How will Statista be beneficial for your market research?
Statista is an incredible tool that lets you perform data-driven market research. By understanding the key trends of your industry, you can modify your business strategy that increase the ROI.
You can use Statista to analyze customers’ preferences, build questionnaires, and even optimize your products by finding the best marketing methods.
Remember that if you want to hit the market confidently with robust data-backed research in hand, Statista will be my best-recommended market research tool for you.
Feature Highlights –
- It provides over 1 million in-depth statistics for several industries.
- You can download the statistical data in multiple formats like PDF, XLS, PNG, and PPT.
- It offers marketing outlook tools that analyze more than 150 markets.
- It provides key rankings and figures about different brands and businesses.
Pricing and Plans – It offers a free account that allows you to download PDF and PNG formats, thus giving access to basic statistics only. The paid plans start at $39/month, suitable for individual users, and the corporate plan starts at $700/month, giving access to dossiers, forecasts, and studies.
5. Survicate– Market Surveying Tool
As a part of market research, you might be interested in knowing your customers’ opinions using your products/services. You will conduct surveys in different methodologies, and the best go-to tool will be Survicate.
Survicate is one of the best online survey tools that offers stunning features to expand your market research capabilities. It also provides more than 200 high-quality templates to design any type of survey to assess your brand.
Using this tool, you can run online polls, create questionnaires, advanced surveys, etc., that let you implement in-depth market research. The great news is that it offers statistical analysis tools that enable you to reliable data-backed decisions that uplift your business’s potential.
How will Survicate be beneficial for your market research?
A business has many parameters when it comes to performing extensive market research. Covering every aspect of that separately will take more time, and there’s no guarantee that you will get the expected response from your target market.
Survicate breaks all these barriers as it offers comprehensive features to break the barriers. You can conduct detailed marketing research on various aspects like product development, consumer segmentation, market sizing, package design analysis, and much more.
A market research tool like Survicate will complement your efforts to boost your business to make better data-driven decisions.
Feature Highlights –
- You can gather feedback through web links, email, mobile chat, social media, etc.
- It enables you to automatically analyze the results and delivers powerful insights.
- You can export the results or integrate the data with your needed apps.
- It enables you to measure responses against the industry benchmarks.
Pricing Plans – It offers a 10-day free trial with access to all its features. The paid plan starts at $59/month, allowing up to 250 monthly responses.
6. Loop11 – Product Usability Testing Tool
What do you think will happen if you have invested your month’s hard work in building a product and it fails to deliver the best user experience? Probably the worst nightmare, right?
Forget about these panicking thoughts when Loop11 is here for you. It is the most accessible online usability testing tool that collects feedback from users on how your product is performing. You can assign specific tasks to the users and ask for their suggestions on pain points they have faced, which help you quickly resolve the issue.
The best part is that you can test your website’s usability level on any device that makes your site infrastructure best suited across mobile, tablets, desktops, etc.
Another critical aspect to focus on is measuring the results which your users have experienced on your product. This market research tool provides comprehensive user testing analytics with advanced data representation, which lets you optimize your product’s UI/UX in the best way possible.
Some of its essential UX metrics include task completion rate, heatmaps, clickstream analysis, system usability scale, time on task, net promoter score, and much more on the go.
How will Loop11 be beneficial for your market research?
Developing a new product is a tedious process. You need to brainstorm design and practical ideas with your colleagues, implement them and see whether the outcome is profitable.
Internally your product may sound good, but when it comes to the customers’ hands in the market, they may discover flaws that might affect your product’s value. There are chances that your product might get less exposure and be unsuccessful.
To combat this and make the process much easier, you can use the Loop11 platform to test the usability level of your product by gathering meaningful insights from the customers.
Instead of facing the aftermath, which will be hard to digest, you can proactively rectify and enhance all the usability elements so that your customers will get a fantastic experience using the best-in-class product.
Feature Highlights –
- You can record video, audio, or the user’s screen, which lets you unbox the critical insights of your product.
- You can use Loop 11’s panel of verified user experience participants or bring them independently.
- After the users have completed the task, it enables you to ask survey questions, including multiple-choice, single response, rating/ranking scale, open responses, etc.
- It allows you to test multiple designs to decide which performs better using A/B testing.
Pricing and Plans – All the plans have a 14-day free trial and they are as follows –
- Rapid Insights – $79/month
- Pro – $299/monthly
- Enterprise – $499/monthly
Wrapping Up
Market research is a vital step that you undertake in understanding how to position your product in the market. Without any proven data, you will not be able to create an effective marketing strategy to launch your business or a new product.
However, with the help of these best market research tools, you can glean, extract, and filter all the components that help you discover your product’s potential.
Here’s a small recap of the best market research tools that I have listed:
- Google Trends – Free Keyword Research Tool
- Make My Persona – Free Persona Creator Tool
- Social Mention – Tracking and Analyzing your brand’s mentions in social media.
- Statista – In-depth and proven statistical insights across various industries
- Survicate – Advanced surveys covering different aspects
- Loop11 – Online Usability testing tool
I hope this article helped you pick the right market research tool for your business. If so, do not forget to share with your fellow entrepreneurs on social media.