Market research is one aspect of your business that should be taken seriously. If you want to succeed in business, then you have to do due diligence to understand your market needs, know who is your target audience and how to serve them.

This is achieved by carrying out market research. You don’t want to start a business that will fizzle out in no time. Neither do you want to see your competitors outpace you due to your inability to know what your customers want or what experiences your customers get when they patronize your brand.

To stay competitive, you have to understand the Dos and Donts of your target market. Let us take a look at what market research means before we go further to highlight some of the most reliable marketing research tools.

What is Market Research?

Market research is any set of principles that are used to gather information so that you can understand the terrain of your target market. Understanding your market psychology will enable you to design better products, formulate a market strategy, and improve user experience so that you can attract quality leads, increase sales and also improve conversion rates.

Market research can be an expensive thing to carry out but it is a foundation on which successful businesses are built. Some companies may not be able to afford premium services of the market research tools available. Then, they can consider running their market research online to save costs.

Market research is based on a couple of factors such as research reports, data collected online, and census data among others.

The Best Market Research Tools

Today, there are lots of market research tools and it is not difficult anymore to conduct market research. Unlike back in the days where people rely on door-to-door surveys, now surveys can be conducted online using the right tools.

We will take a look at some of the best market research tools available today and how you can leverage on their features to make your business beat the competition in the market.

1. Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is a market research tool that is used for conducting intensive online surveys. This is a survey tool that helps you gauge the acceptability of your brand by your audience. SurveyMonkey allows you to create in-depth surveys, conduct marketing research, and run opinion polls.

It comes with lots of pre-built survey templates including features that help to speed up your research process. It has a user-friendly interface and supports survey logic. There are features on SurveyMonkey that can help you to fully customize your surveys.

The questions on SurveyMonkey are framed in ways that eliminate customer sentiment. Despite the multiple pre-built templates, you can still create your surveys from the beginning.

Top features available on SurveyMonkey include the following;

  • It can be used on your mobile devices. 
  • It has more than 200 survey templates.
  • User-friendly interface.
  • It can create quick surveys.
  • AI-powered questions selection.
  • It can easily integrate with other software.
  • It has advanced reporting features.
  • It supports advanced logic functions.
  • Graduation of quizzes and automatic scoring.

2. Google Trends

Google trends are the most suitable market research tool for individuals who are focused on keyword research. It is a tool that is provided by Google to help your content rank highly on search engines. It offers marketers and SEOs a good idea of what people around the world are looking out for on the internet. 

What makes Google Trends different from other market research tools is that it can help you compare keywords. The result from this comparison will give you insight into how certain search terms are doing compared to other terms.

With Google Trends, you can know how popular search topics are doing. You can also organize the results based on time, region, and network type. This is a perfect tool to know which keywords are currently trending.   

Google Trends is a good software to measure dips or spikes in search volume that have been prevalent due to events. This can help in gaining traction as far as SEO or paid search for content marketing is concerned. It can help you rank high on Google search engines.

Important features on Google Trends include the following;

  • Easy and fast competition analysis.
  • Perfect for comparing trending keywords. 
  • Data segmentation is based on geographic and temporal parameters.
  • It helps you capture the interest of your customers by helping you to identify what is trending on the market.
  • It offers coverage across different search networks like YouTube search, image search, and Google Shopping among others.

3. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is the best tool for AI-based experience management. This is a market research platform that is used by thousands of brands across the globe for performing high-quality market research at a fast pace and managing customer experience.  

It allows you to manage all your customer experience from one dashboard. It helps you perform competitive benchmarking, market segmentation, and gathering customer feedback on new products and services. These are some of the many things you can do with Qualtrics.

With Qualtrics, you can get in-depth insights into all areas of market research. It uses advanced statistical methods to show you details of what your target audience is all about. If you need a market research tool that helps you understand purchase behaviors and also develop a marketing strategy, then Qualtrics is your best choice.

Important Features that are available on Qualtrics include;

  • It has academic research options.
  • Market trends analysis.
  • A/B testing for effective change management.
  • In-depth ad testing that covers all customer segments.
  • Online panel management. It is fully optimized for all screen sizes.
  • On-demand access to millions of respondents.
  • The conjoint analysis feature helps to optimize the customer experience.
  • Brand tracking on all online channels.

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4. Social Mention

Social Mention is a marketing research tool that is specifically designed for carrying out social media research in real-time. It gives you an insight into what your prospects and existing customers or clients are discussing online.

With Social Mention, it becomes easy to know what social media activities that your audiences are engaging in on different websites. All you need to do to search for a particular keyword is to type the keyword, website URL, or hashtag in the search bar and you will see all the mentions regarding what keyword you have searched for.

The search with this tool cuts across all social media sites. This means that you can have an in-depth insight on the keyword searched from all available social media. You can engage with your customers in real-time using Social Mention.

Social Mentions will give you a broad knowledge of how customers or clients interact with your products and services. What experience your customers have when they use your products or brand goes a long way in determining whether they will refer you or patronize you again. Hence, you need to get their feedback to know how to best serve them.

The important features on Social Mentions include the following;

  • Detailed competitor analysis.
  • Real-time interactions with customers and brand monitoring.
  • Its search cuts across most common social media sites.
  • Online reputation management.
  • You can easily find the best influencers for your brands.
  • It offers features for a unique keyword, hashtag, and sentiment analysis.

5. Statista

Statista is a market research tool that is excellent for researching businesses and understanding the nature of competition in industries. it is best for statistical data analysis. It offers free information regarding the size of an industry, and the average expenditures of the company or industry.

Statista is one of the most popular online research platforms. It is a data analysis tool that contains data from more than 600m industries, this means with Statista, you will have access to global data for your research.

It has a user-friendly interface and when you search for keywords or topics on the site, you will get data that appears in blue-colored charts. Don’t worry about any complexity, it is not difficult to understand the chart. 

With Statista, you can have easy access to data regarding market research for content marketing purposes and the preparation of online questionnaires. It is a market research platform where you can get authentic statistics that is from reliable sources. 

Statista offers you easily understandable result charts and a clutter-free interface with many reporting tools.

The important features on Statista are as follows;

  • Marketing outlook tools.
  • Access to global data and surveys.
  • Infographics.
  • It provides you with in-depth statistics and analysis across different industries.
  • Related data and statistics.
  • It gives you an accurate report regarding digital trends for your businesses and brands.

6. Typeform

Typeform is a cloud-based market research tool that is best for building feedback forms. It is a good research tool for creating feedback and surveys. You can use Typeform to create surveys for collecting customer information in a manner that is exciting and meaningful.

It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with a drag-and-drop feature for creating customized surveys. It also has reporting and detailed analysis feature and you can view real-time responses.

Typeform permits you to customize surveys according to your brand image. You can use it to create short questionnaires, picture-based surveys and you can create as many surveys as possible. It is a perfect tool to create trending surveys because the answers you will get depends on how you ask the questions.  

The top features that you will find on Typeform are as follows;

  • It has great tools for data analysis.
  • Live training online.
  • It is cloud-based.
  • It is suitable on desktop and for mobile surveys.
  • It can easily integrate with over 500 other business apps.
  • Codeless from development.

7. Tableau

Tableau is a market research tool that is most suitable for users who want to carry out market research using visual data. It helps both established businesses and new businesses to make the right decisions in a simple manner despite working with complex data. It is a tool to quickly analyze complex and critical data easily.

You can use Tableau to garner and analyze data from different sources such as Google Analytics, Excel sheets, and relational databases. The data you collate is then used to form combined datasets that are used to have a better knowledge of the market.

Tableau is a tool you can use to create and analyze data according to different criteria such as demographics, geography, and target audience. You can also create pictorial or visual content for your target audience.

You can create visualizations and reports using the drag-and-drop feature on Tableau; this does not need any coding knowledge. Tableau can be used on both desktop and mobile devices.

Tableau offers the following top features;

  • It is fully optimized for use on all mobile devices.
  • Offers programming-free data collation and collection.
  • Dedicated customer service.
  • Multiple levels of analysis granularity.
  • Secured collaboration and sharing.
  • Easy switching between extracted and live data.
  • It can integrate with applications like Salesforce and SharePoint.
  • It offers unlimited data connectors that can be shared both on the cloud and on-site.

8. Attest

The Attest market research platform offers you the chance of carrying all kinds of market research. With this tool, you can carry out market and competitor analysis, test creative ads, connect to millions of customers, build surveys, and get real-time responses.

You can easily find out what your audience thinks about your brand, familiarize yourself with their buying habits, and carry out quick surveys using attest.

9. Heartbeat Ai

Heartbeat Ai is an innovative market research tool that uses machine learning and natural language processing to extract actionable insights regarding customer and employee emotions. It works based on the principle that human emotion is an important facet of market research that is not being given attention.

10. KeySurvey

KeySurvey is a market research platform that allows you to put together your questionnaires online. However, you will also be the one to source for the participants who will fill the questionnaire.

11. Questback

Questback is a market research platform that bridges the gap between your target market and your brand. It is a premium service that is good for conducting in-depth research on your behalf. It will help you gain fast insights and valuable feedback regarding your brand or business.

12. Google Keywords Tool

The Google keywords tool offers you a window where you can search for consumer behavior using specific keywords related to your products and services. You will need to create a Google AdWords account to enjoy this service; creating this account is free so you have nothing to worry about. You can read more on how to use this tool; it is an economic way of carrying out market research.

Summary

Whether you are starting a new business or you are trying to consolidate or expand your business, marketing research is something that can help your business grow or succeed. Knowing customer behavioral patterns, and using these patterns to your advantage is an insight that can help you beat your competitors in the same niche.

The market research software that we have highlighted in this article are capable of helping you carry out hassle-free market research for your brand. They have simplified the task for you as most of them come with pre-built customer templates and you don’t need to have any coding knowledge to use them.

Go through what each of the software can do for your business and pick the right one for you in terms of their specific functions, what you wish to achieve, your budget, and the kind of audiences you wish to reach out to.

The interesting part is that you can opt for one of these tools or a combination of two or more to conduct your market research. We will take a look at a brief on what these software can do for you.

  • Survey Monkey is most suitable for creating an in-depth survey online.
  • Google Trends is good for researchers who wish to focus on keyword research.
  • Qualtrics is best for AI-based experience management.
  • Social Mention is the right tool for users who are concerned with social media research.
  • Statista is the right tool for analyzing statistical data for your brand.
  • Typeform is the most suitable market research tool for users who want to focus on research by getting feedback via query or feedback forms.
  • Tableau is the best software for researchers interested in visual data analytics.
  • Attest helps you to know what your customers are saying and how they are reacting to your products and services.
  • Heartbeat AI: If you need a machine learning tool that can help with interpreting the behavior of your customers for proper brand strategy then Heartbeat AI is one tool that can help in this regard.
  • KeySurvey is good for those who want to get opinions regarding their brands and are working on a low budget.
  • Questback is a platform that can help you carry out quick research.
  • Google Keyword Tool is a great tool available online and it is free. You can use it to get opinions or customer behavior regarding certain trending topics or keywords.

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