The 328 million terabytes of data we create each day can be very telling about your target audience’s preferences and buying habits. This same data can also be inaccurate and low quality, depending on the source. That’s why the market research tools you choose matter — you need to be able to get the most up-to-date insights and trust what the data is telling you.
While traditional manual methods of market research and secondary research (aka desk research or complementary research) still have a time and place in the digital world, marketers are supplementing them with market research platforms and software that do most of the heavy lifting.
Astronomical amounts of market-related data are created at lightning speed, far outpacing our ability to consume it all. To help find, filter, sort, and make sense of all this information, we’ve chosen 13 of the best market research tools to streamline and improve the process:
Meltwater Radarly
Statista
Think With Google
Attest
Typeform
Ubersuggest
SurveyMonkey
Answer the Public
BrandMentions
Heartbeat AI
Discuss
U.S. Census Bureau
Tableau
Tip: Also take a look at the top secondary research companies out there.
Meltwater Radarly
A leader in AI market research tools, Radarly is Meltwater’s AI-powered market research platform that provides real-time insights into consumer preferences. This always-on consumer intelligence suite uses a combination of data science, AI, and human market research expertise to surface insights about customers based on online conversations and activities.
Most of the world’s data is unstructured (about 90%, by some estimates), making it harder to act on and understand its significance. Radarly brings structure to the unknown by detecting patterns and understanding audience sentiments.
Also, Meltwater for market research continuously sources new information and works in real-time. This gives marketers an advantage by working with the latest data so they can make informed decisions when it matters most.
Statista
Statista offers data trends and reports on a wide range of topics and interests, from Facebook’s monthly active users to leading beer brands based on sales. In total, the market research platform spans more than 170 industries and 150 countries.
What sets this resource apart is its visualizations — all of Statista’s stats have been compiled into neat and tidy graphs that are ready to publish or share in your own reports. This makes it easy to see trends over time or gain quick insights about consumer preferences.
There’s a chart for just about anything, and they’re updated on a regular basis. In many cases, Statista will include a brief explanation of the chart’s findings and recommend related charts for further research.
Think With Google
Google’s status as the world’s most popular search engine makes it a great resource for market research. Google has access to billions of first-party data points based on what people are searching for online.
For market research purposes, users can tap into Google Trends to see the popularity of searches over time. See the terms that are trending on a daily or weekly basis, or check out shopping-related trends to predict the hot new products of the season (trend prediction).
Google’s Market Finder can also pinpoint new markets that might be a great fit for your product or service. Learn how various markets compare to each other and how your business might fit in.
And if you’re selling physical products, you can see how sales trends might impact your business using Google’s Rising Retail Categories. Retailers use this tool often to predict hot-selling holiday items and right-size their inventory.
Attest
Attest brings old-school focus groups and surveys into the digital era with its rapid-response approach. In the past, organizing interviews and focus groups took weeks or even months. Once the research activities were finished, analysts required additional time to compile the results. No more.
With Attest, you can hear directly from consumers who fit your audience profiles, with ready-made questions and respondents at your fingertips. All responses are recorded in the Attest platform, and the market research software analyzes results and collects consumer insights on your behalf.
Users pay per response, so you can scale your market research as needed.
Typeform
A popular survey tool, Typeform offers a mobile-friendly way to collect market research insights. It’s unique in that it only shows users one field at a time to limit distractions. The look and feel lend to a more casual, conversational approach, which may encourage survey takers to be more candid in their responses. (We can’t prove it, though.)
Users can create various question types, including multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and scale ratings. It’s intuitive and makes basic market research a breeze.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest, a popular keyword research tool, also has market research capabilities packed into its user-friendly interface. That’s because keyword research is a form of market research, giving you a glimpse of what people are actively searching for online.
Let’s say you’re launching a new facial cleaning device for your beauty brand. By using Ubersuggest for keyword research, you can also uncover:
- Other brands selling facial cleaning devices
- Publications talking about facial cleaning devices
- The popularity of online searches for facial cleaning devices
- Competition for related keywords
- Questions related to the keyword “facial cleaning device”
- Cost per click to rank for the keyword via paid ads
- Search volume (and interest) over time
This is a great tool to help you see who your top competitors are online, what type of content ranks well for a keyword, and how crowded a market is for a particular product or service.
SurveyMonkey
Market research doesn’t always have to be a costly, complex beast, and SurveyMonkey is a great example. This easy-to-use survey tool can create simple or in-depth surveys sent to targeted audiences for feedback.
For example, you might have one-off questions to ask customers who made a purchase to learn more about their buying habits. Or, you might want to send longer surveys to customers to help develop a new product. No matter your use case, you can customize surveys to reach highly specific audiences and compile their answers instantly.
SurveyMonkey also offers turnkey market research solutions, including a global panel survey, translation services, and a reporting dashboard. These services can help you reach more people and get more use from your data.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a free search listening tool that compiles the questions people are asking online. These questions can serve as a starting point for new product development, product improvements, and content marketing.
This market research software uses autocomplete data from Google. When you start typing a search, Google will try to guess what you’re looking for based on what other people have searched for. You can do this manually, but it’s time-consuming and relies only on your ideas.
Answer the Public makes life easier by compiling related questions in an easy-to-understand graphic. And since the data comes from Google, market researchers can trust its reliability and quality.
BrandMentions
Ever wonder what it is about a brand (including yours) that people love? The things that get people talking? BrandMentions can help provide some context.
Specializing in social media monitoring, BrandMentions takes the next step into showing why a particular keyword is buzzing. Type in a keyword and you’ll see recent social media posts that also contain that keyword.
You can also see the keyword’s Reach, Performance, and Number of Mentions — all of which can come in handy when you’re planning a new product launch. You can use these insights to plan your launch-related posts to generate the most buzz.
Tip: Learn more about brand monitoring, brand tracking, brand reputation measurement, about the best brand tracking software, and understand why your brand mentions are spiking.
Heartbeat AI
AI market research tools like Heartbeat AI allow you to put market research on autopilot, or at least close to it. Using sentiment analysis, this market research tool recognizes themes and trends in qualitative text data.
No more poring through pages and pages of text — Heartbeat AI can quickly surface insights about how your audience feels regarding your brand or products (or your competitors). What’s more, it can turn these insights into attractive visuals for simpler understanding or sharing with other stakeholders.
Discuss
Qualitative research can be more difficult to sort and analyze because it contains more variables. Unlike quantitative research, which deals with specific, measurable data, qualitative research involves the complexities of human behavior and perception. The results are subjective in nature, and it involves more work to extract their value.
Discuss aims to change the narrative with AI-powered insights. Offering video capabilities, built-in note-taking, and auto-generated highlight reels, marketers can capture the “Aha!” moments without losing efficiency.
The market research platform makes it easy to refer back to conversations and keep their audience engaged throughout the process, leading to more complete data.
U.S. Census Bureau
One of the oldest but most trusted market research sources, the U.S. Census Bureau offers basic demographic information about U.S. citizens. This platform gives you instant insight into America’s people, including things like family sizes, income levels, and populations.
Beyond demographics, the market research platform has thousands of tables and maps to bring your research to life. You can customize your own maps and tables using any of the data available.
Another option is to find your business’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code, and then filter the Tables tool to focus on your industry. This allows you to see where your industry is most popular and where it might be over- or under-saturated.
Tableau
Tableau from Salesforce is a business intelligence platform that connects to all of your data sources, making it easier to connect the dots between disparate systems. It excels at transforming unstructured data into visualizations to streamline decisions.
Their goal is to democratize data and make it more accessible and user-friendly. It accomplishes its mission with a user-friendly interface, visual data transcriptions, and a community of more than a million members who share how-tos and best practices.
Make Your Market Research Tools Work for You
Online market research tools aren’t replacing the traditional survey or focus group — they’re enhancing them by providing an always-on approach to speed up results. By tapping into the wealth of data people are openly sharing online, businesses can gain more insights than ever before, on demand.
Meltwater offers some of the best tools for market research that are accurate, reliable, and easy to use. By tapping into billions of data points and analyzing them in the context of your business, you can make valuable data-driven decisions to move your company forward.
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