tools for market research analysis

25 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

Published: April 30, 2024

Conducting market research pulls details together to help you choose new products or services to launch. They also help identify your audiences and best marketing strategies so you are ready to act without the guesswork.

Businesses use market research software to minimize risk and make more data-driven choices.

I own a small business, and by gathering facts and opinions, I can better predict whether new products or features — and for more prominent companies, even locations — will succeed before investing.

Here are 25 of the best tools for conducting market research, including a few recommendations directly from HubSpot market researchers and bloggers who use them.

Helpful Market Research Tools & Resources

1. similarweb.

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Similarweb is probably the highest quality, most well-known, and most convenient way to get and compare traffic information about any website you land on — short of having an expert analyst whispering in your ear, which could get awkward. Their free suite of products — including the Chrome extension — is worth exploring and gives you useful, high-level information. The deep insights come from taking advantage of their database of real-world information on global website performance gathered over time, which they’ve already been building for over 10 years. They have their finger on the pulse of online business worldwide, from sales to sites to stocks.

Microsoft, Amazon, and even Google use Similarweb and the insights they provide on other enterprise-level operations down to small businesses. If you want to know how your company stacks up and then initiate a robust research and marketing campaign, these are serious tools that can help you grow.

What I like: One of their add-ons is called App Intelligence, and it can benchmark your growth and track your progress against millions of apps — for both iOS and Android — and provide daily insights on app rankings, engagement, retention, and more.

Pricing : Starter plans cost $125 per month paid annually; professional plans cost $333 per month billed annually; team and enterprise plans have custom pricing.

For Max Iskiev , market research analyst at HubSpot, one research tool stands out from the rest: Glimpse.

He told me, “Glimpse is my favorite research tool. It’s quick and easy to use, allowing me to design and launch short surveys for real-time insights on trending topics.”

Writers for the HubSpot Marketing Blog have also used Glimpse to run short, 100-person surveys for articles (case in point: Are Sales Reps Rushing Back to the Office? ).

Not only is Glimpse valuable for doing quick pulse-checks on the latest trends, but it also leverages the power of AI for even deeper insights.

“Glimpse really shines when it comes to open-ended questions, using natural language processing and AI to analyze emotion and sentiment, saving time, and offering invaluable insights,” Iskiev shared.

Best for: Those who can invest in AI tools for their businesses but don’t need a decade’s deep dive like users of Similarweb might.

Pricing : Starter Plan - Free; Professional - $500/month; Advanced - $1,000/month; Enterprise - custom pricing.

3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo offers several highly useful tools that work best as a content research tool for mid-size businesses and up. If you need many ideas for a whole lot of content, BuzzSumo is likely a good fit for your company.

Their monitoring tools can alert you to new content that relates to your keywords of choice.

This is smart for writers, content strategists, and those who manage writers and content strategists to stay on top of trends in what consumers want to know more about within your industry — so you’re right there to provide it.

BuzzSumo also gives you access to reporting tools that stream various sources of information to your dashboard, making it easy to keep up with developments and build visual assets to communicate about them.

You can find major influencers — worldwide — through BuzzSumo that fit your brand to sponsor and collaborate with.

Unfortunately, BuzzSumo doesn’t integrate well with Instagram, so you’ll want to focus on influencers that use other social channels unless you’re willing to do IG work on the side.

What I like: Their Chrome extension is a nice addition to their offerings for companies that work with freelancers and remote workers to take the work on the move.

Pricing: Free 30-day trials are available. Content creation plans cost $199 per month; PR and comms plans cost $299 per month; suite plans cost $499 per month; and Enterprise plans cost $999 per month.

4. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a sister product to UberSuggest, both being brainchildren of Neil Patel.

Answer: the Public watches what people are searching for and lets you keep track of how things change over time. By studying the changes, you can be at the front of trends — positive or negative — so you can respond to the changes quickly.

It’s billed as an excellent tool for public relations professionals to give them a heads-up on how their company is faring in the public eye.

If you fall on the wrong side of public sentiment, you can be right on top of salvaging the situation and making improvements to regain trust.

If you’re doing something right and see gains in positive engagement, you know to keep up what you’re doing and may even want to expand upon it.

Great examples of what organizations have done with information like this include Wendy’s ongoing roasts and savage clapbacks on social media.

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s hilarious insistence on not bringing mountain lions in the house also nabbed engagement by the truckloads (of corgis).

What I like: I like that Masterclass videos are available. They make sure to include lots of opportunities to learn how to best use their products and get maximum value from the suite.

Pricing : Individual plans cost $9 per month; pro plans cost $99 per month; expert plans cost $199 per month. Lifetime Pricing is available. Individual lifetime plans cost $99, pro lifetime plans cost $199; and expert lifetime plans cost $1,990.

5. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar SEO is all-in for AI. If your leadership wants a slice of the AI action at work in the company’s market research, this might be the tool to reach for.

It uses ChatGPT-4, and the peer-to-peer review site G2 ranked it the #1 AI writing tool for SEO in 2022 and 2023.

What sets it apart is that the AI writing assistant doesn’t just compile and give word to information it finds online.

It offers selections of relevant keywords, titles, headings, industry standard word counts, and link suggestions that you can choose from as you move through the outline.

They also include tools for keyword research, keyword ranking, and information about your keyword competitors. And because Google search is incorporated into the suite, you can do most, if not all, of your writing work on one screen.

Pro tip: As with all AI content, you’ll need a writer to bring the content to life by fact-checking information, adding unique or inside perspectives, meaningful quotes, and many other values that make the content rich to read.

GrowthBar SEO knows this, and you can source freelance writers there as well!

Pricing : A seven-day free trial is available. Standard plans cost $36 per month; pro plans cost $74.25 per month; and agency plans cost $149.25 per month.

6. Statista

Statista is a data visualization website that takes data from reputable reports across the web and makes them easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators just like you.

“Statista is like my market research sidekick, giving me all the data I need without the endless search. No more digging through the haystack. With Statista, I can spot trends and make informed decisions with ease," Icee Griffin , market researcher at HubSpot, told me.

One neat aspect of using Statista is that the same chart is updated as the years pass. Say that you want to allude to the value of the beauty market in your proposal.

If your investor accesses that same graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers. Statista finds the most recent research to update their visualizations.

Pro tip: Statista doesn’t carry out original research, but does have around 100 analysts who seek out gaps in their resources to provide ever more useful, trending data.

Pricing : Basic plans are free. Starter plans cost $199 per month, billed annually. Professional plans cost $959 per month, billed annually.

7. Think With Google Research Tools

Wish you had information on your product’s likelihood of success?

Think With Google’s marketing research tools offer interesting insights on whether anyone is looking for your product ( Google Trends ), which markets to launch to ( Market Finder ), and what retail categories rise as the months and seasons pass ( Rising Retail Categories ).

If you’d like to market your product through YouTube, the Find My Audience tool allows you to investigate what your potential viewers are interested in and what you should discuss on your brand’s YouTube channel.

What I like: Free and incredibly useful in my experience, small and newer businesses really benefit from having tools like this to conduct market research and get their growth rolling.

Pricing : Free

8. Census Bureau

The Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching U.S. census data.

You can filter by age, income, year, and location. You can also use some of its shortcuts to access visualizations of the data, allowing you to see potential target markets across the country.

If you’re considering a highly competitive product or service, you can easily find out where your target industry is most popular — or where the market has been oversaturated.

Another helpful tool is the Census Bureau Business and Economy data , where you can also target premade tables depending on your industry.

Pro tip: The text information on each screen can be overwhelming, so here’s a shortcut for you. One of the best ways to use this tool is by finding the NAICS code for your business.

Then, access the " Tables “ tool, click ”Filter" on the sidebar, and search for your industry.

9. Make My Persona

HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. In this tool, you pick a name for the persona, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges.

This allows you to pinpoint both demographic and psychographic information.

Creating a buyer persona is an early step in the marketing process but an important one to avoid scope creep.

If you’re unsure about details like these and how to use market research tools for your business, let me recommend Hubspot’s Market Research Kit .

It’s completely free and helps you build a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making in your future marketing strategies.

Best for: Make My Persona is best suited to B2B product launches because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges.

Ideally, your product would solve a problem for them in the workplace or help their company achieve revenue goals.

10. Tableau

Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to “connect to virtually any data source.” But the data isn’t presented in unreadable tables.

Rather, Tableau helps you visualize this data in a way that helps you glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.

You can visualize data on anything from corn production in tropical climate zones to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look you’d like into potential marketplaces and supplier regions.

What I like: Visual information for humans and pure data for the machines all in one. Tableau integrates well with spreadsheets and databases so that you can export Tableau data to Excel , back up records in Amazon Redshift, and more.

Pricing : Tableau Viewer plans cost $14 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Explorer plans cost $42 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Creator plans cost $75 per user each month when billed annually.

11. Paperform

A market research survey is an effective way to better understand your target audience and their needs by asking them directly.

This step is integral to understanding your dream customers’ problems, so you want to ensure the process is as interactive as possible and gathers objective, accurate responses.

With its free-text interface, Paperform is as simple as writing a Word document. You can make your survey stand out by customizing colors, fonts, layouts, and themes to create your unique look and feel.

There are 27+ question field types, such as ranking, matrix, or scale fields. Use several to create visually engaging surveys that collect more information and see higher completion stats.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can use one of their expertly-made questionnaires or market research survey templates to get you started.

Best for: In my experience, Paperform is able to efficiently incorporate multiple customer personas. It uses conditional logic to show or hide questions or whole sections of content to create fully personalized paths.

These interactive forms lower drop-off rates and boost customer interaction.

Pricing: Essentials plans cost $29 per month. Pro plans cost $59 per month. Business plans cost $199 per month. For enterprise pricing, contact Paperform’s sales team.

GWI is an on-demand consumer research platform that makes audience research a breeze. Powered by the world’s largest study on the online consumer base, GWI provides insights into the lives of over 2.8 billion consumers across 50+ markets.

With 250k+ profiling points, you can find your unique customers and learn everything you need to know about who they are, what’s on their minds, and what they’re up to.

One user-friendly platform makes it quick and easy to become an expert on your audience and capture the answers you need to succeed.

Pro tip: GWI even has features to compare markets and create customized and shareable charts in seconds, helping you distribute critical information as quickly as you find it.

Pricing : Explore Interactive Demo for free; Flexible and custom pricing with discounts available.

13. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth market research surveys that will help you understand your market and consumer preferences.

With this tool, you can create targeted, uber-specific surveys that help you collect answers that pertain specifically to your product.

While using a data source can give you a general overview of your target audience and market, SurveyMonkey can help you get more granular insights from real consumers.

SurveyMonkey offers dedicated market research solutions and services and a reporting dashboard option that allows you to easily parse through the results.

What I like: I like that SurveyMonkey is a good fit for exploring markets beyond your shores. It includes a global survey panel and survey translation service for international research.

• Individual plans: Advantage annual plans cost $39 per month. Premier annual plans cost $119 a month. Monthly plans cost $99 per month.
• Team plans: Team advantage plans cost $29 per person each month. Team premier plans cost $75 per person each month.
• Enterprise pricing is available upon request.

14. Typeform

Like SurveyMonkey, Typeform allows you to run research surveys to get direct answers from your target consumers. It’s an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that’s great for market research.

Typeform’s distinguishing factor is that it shows viewers one form field at a time. In its templates, Typeform encourages a more conversational, casual approach (like in its market research survey template ).

You can create a wide range of question types, and other features include the ability to recall answers from previous questions and create logic jumps.

In a survey, you’d want to collect both demographic and psychographic information on your customers to understand their purchasing behaviors and the problems they encounter.

The goal is to find out if your product is the solution to one of those problems — and whether, before launching, you should add more features or rethink your product positioning strategy .

Best for: I think Typeform is best for product launches that target a younger demographic.

If you’re targeting C-suite executives at established firms, consider a more formal option, such as SurveyMonkey, or keeping your tone more formal in your questions.

Pricing : Free plans are available. Basic plans cost $29 per month. Plus plans cost $59 per month. Business plans cost $99 per month. Enterprise plans are available upon request.

15. PureSpectrum Insights (Previously Upwave Instant Insights )

PureSpectrum acquired Upwave Instant Insights in 2021 and rebranded as PureSpectrum Insights.

As before, this platform is primarily a consumer research tool. While it isn’t advertised as a survey creation tool, it allows you to launch market research surveys specifically to get consumer insights.

PureSpectrum allows you to perform customer and market segmentation and also to visualize your data for easy scanning by key stakeholders and investors. They’ve grown to include A/B testing, brand tracking, and customer sentiment.

Pro tip: PureSpectrum distributes your survey to real people. Take a look at their marketplace profile to get a sense of where and from whom you can collect valuable data.

Pricing : Schedule a demo for more information.

16. Claritas MyBestSegment

Claritas MyBestSegment provides product researchers with tools to understand a specific area’s demographic information as well as the lifestyle habits of those who live there.

Their audience segments give you information gleaned from tens of thousands of data points, giving you insight into much more than just household income, employment, and education levels.

By finding out what a segment of the population does — without having to go out and survey them — you can find out which areas would be most receptive to a campaign or launch.

You can also discover which competitors are located nearby and which lifestyle trends have shifted or are on the rise.

What I like: I like that they are able to do some of the leg work for you. Syndicated Audiences is a tool available from Claritas for finding an organized audience of consumers who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

Pricing : Pricing is available upon request.

Loop11 is a user experience testing platform that allows you to test the usability of your website, study user intent, test the information architecture of your site, and examine how the user experience changes based on the device they’re using.

Loop11 tests your site on any device by making users perform tasks. They then complete a short question about how easy or difficult the task was to complete.

Your product may be phenomenal, but unless consumers can actually buy it through your site, your launch won’t be successful.

You can use Loop11’s participants for niche demographics or bring in your own to learn more about your current customers.

Best for: Market research for your site development. You can find out whether your target consumers find your site easy to navigate and also identify snags that prevent conversions.

Pricing : Rapid Insights plans cost $199 monthly or $179 per month, billed annually. Pro plans cost $399 per month or $358 per month, billed annually. Enterprise plans cost $599 per month or $533 per month, billed annually.

18. Userlytics

Like Loop11, Userlytics allows you to test the usability of your website, mobile app, and site prototype. You can target different devices, define a buyer persona, and disqualify participants based on screening questions.

Testing is based on tasks that your test-takers carry out. They then answer a simple question about the difficulty of the task. You can structure the question in various ways:

You can leave it open-ended, provide multiple choices, or ask for a rating. Other formats you can use include System Usability Scale (SUS) questions, Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions, and Single Ease Questions (SEQ).

What I like: Userlytics performs both a webcam and a screen recording. You can compare the user’s answers with their reactions on video to understand how they feel when they’re interacting with your assets.

Pricing : Schedule a free demo for more information.

Sometimes, you need a no-frills test to take the pulse of consumers. Temper allows you to create a question and pop it onto your website, into your emails, etc.

The smiley face, “meh” face, and frowny face make it easy for viewers to share their feelings — and for you to read their minds.

You can also add it to a product page or a landing page, tailoring the questions to fit your offerings.

As for what you see, there are three options for receiving the feedback: in a tab on each page you are monitoring, embedded in the web page itself to narrow in on aspects within the page, or at the bottom of emails so you can get real-time information as the interaction unfolds.

Pro tip: One great way I’ve seen this used is by adding it to a blog post announcing the launch of a new product. You can find out general sentiment toward the product before it even launches!

Pricing : Hobby plans cost $12 per month. Pro plans cost $49 per month. Business plans cost $89 per month. White label plans cost $199 per month.

20. NielsenIQ (NIQ)

NielsenIQ (NIQ) is a retail and consumer intelligence consultant that works with you to collect consumer insights, identify the best distribution channels for your product, and create a range of products to address the needs of your target buyers.

This service helps you look at your product launch from all angles, delivering forecasting data that predicts how your sales will perform upon launch. NielsenIQ can also run consumer insights surveys on their list of panelists and partners.

NIQ now offers a service called Byzzer to help small businesses with fewer resources. It opens a door for market research reporting, in-person events, and consulting at a lower cost than the full NIQ suite.

Best for: I think Byzzer can be a helpful and affordable option for smaller businesses, but because NielsenIQ operates like a consultant and not as a self-service software, it is a better option for established firms with a bigger product launch budget.

Pricing : Pricing is available on request.

21. Ubersuggest

Don’t be intimidated by the visually text-heavy Ubersuggest. It really is an easy tool for doing keyword and content research. You just input a phrase, and it’ll create a list of keyword suggestions.

You can also see top-performing articles and pages to better understand the types of content that rank for those keywords.

This tool is useful for market research because you can see who your top competitors are, how often your product is searched for, and whether there’s enough space in the market for the type of product you’re launching.

You can also find out the questions your target audience asks in relation to the product. Each of these questions can be turned into an informative blog post that can guide your audience, increase your brand authority, and drive conversions.

Pro tip: If you want a quick look at the results you can get, head to their website and do a search — just know that you only get one glimpse before they make you register. Alternatives to Ubersuggest include Moz , Ahrefs , and SEMRush .

Pricing : Free seven-day trials are available for all three tiers. Individual plans cost $29 per month. Business plans cost $49 per month. Enterprise and agency plans cost $99 per month. Add-ons are available at $5 each. Lifetime memberships are also available.

22. Pew Research Center

From economic conditions to political attitudes, social media usage to food science, the Pew Research Center website has loads of free research that you can use to better understand your target markets.

Be careful with your curiosity, though. It’s a gorgeous trap of interesting information that can drain your day away — but so happily.

I that Pew Research Center integrates visual data directly into the text — and we’re not talking about a chart or image spliced in.

The site has hundreds of interactive articles that allow you to filter and sift through the data for more granular, targeted insights while also making dense information easier to understand.

Their research topic selection is delightfully vast. Click the top left tab for “ Research Topics.” Then, there is a link to their “ Full Topic List .” Once there, each topic cluster has a “ More ” option.

What I like: As a writer in digital marketing, I am always on the hunt for targeted and nutritious quotes and insights. I love that you have access to what research participants actually had to say below the Pew Research articles.

It’s a stellar feature for building compelling presentations. The quotes are tagged, too, so you can sort quotes more specifically on various concepts or groups related to the research.

Here’s an example article — scroll to the In Their Own Words section at the bottom to check it out.

23. SocialMention (Part of BrandMentions)

SocialMention is a part of BrandMentions focused on social media monitoring. The platform helps you understand what your prospective customers are buzzing about online.

Search for a keyword, and SocialMentions will show you recent social posts that contain that keyword, along with the context of its usage.

After subscribing to the platform, you’ll also get other metrics such as Reach (how many people view the keyword per day), Performance (how many people engage with the keyword per day), and Mentions by Weekday (when people mention the keyword).

One way to use this tool for market research is by finding out what time of day or night people are looking for your product on social media sites.

Let’s say you’ve developed a sleeping aid app and learn through SocialMention that most people look for sleeping aid apps at 2:00 AM. When you start announcing your product, you will need to schedule your post around 2:00 AM.

Pro tip: Another useful tool you’ll have access to is sentiment analysis on your keywords. It allows you to find out how people are generally feeling about the type of product you’re launching.

That way, you can refine the tone of your campaigns.

Pricing : Growing business plans cost $79 per month. Company plans cost $249 per month. Enterprise and agency plans cost $399 per month. All prices are billed annually.

24. Qualtrics Market Research Panels

Qualtrics takes away the hassle of finding respondents for your market research surveys. They provide an online sample service so you can access real, live human thoughts without having to actually manage any humans.

It’s an introverted marketer’s dream come true!

Once you’ve identified your target audience, head on over to Qualtrics and sign up to access a representative sample.

You can then use Qualtrics’ built-in platform to start gathering insights and information from the people whose pain points you might be able to help solve.

Pro tip: You can actually choose between Qualtrics’ built-in platform or using your own chosen survey software . Sometimes, you’re already familiar and comfy with one system or need to hustle with a program you know — Qualtrics lets you pick.

25. ProProfs Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an advanced user and market research tool that helps you understand your specific market with targeted surveys.

You can run surveys on over six channels at once — such as website, app, product, social media, and email — to get a 360-degree view of your existing and potential customers.

It comes packed with features like question branching, 12+ answer types, automatic survey language translation, in-depth audience targeting, pre-built survey templates, and an extensive repository of professionally designed questions.

You can create various market research surveys in minutes to collect data on the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits of your target audience.

It can help you map customers’ expectations and preferences, create customer personas, and perform audience segmentation.

Qualaroo also promotes quick feedback analysis. Its in-built AI-based sentiment analysis and text analytics engine automatically categorizes the responses based on user moods.

It also highlights the key phrases and words in real time, saving hours of manual work.

What we like: In my experience, you can get an awful lot done with just this one source for conducting market research. I like it for its rare combination of tool inclusivity and affordable pricing — it’s definitely a solid source to start with.

Pricing : Omni channel plans for up to 50 responses are free. Omni channel plans for businesses up to 100 responses cost $19.99 per month, billed annually. Email surveys up to 50 responses are free.

Email surveys for businesses up to 100 responses cost $9.99 per month, billed annually.

Conduct Market Research for a Successful Product Launch

Conducting market research is essential to a successful product launch to market.

With the tools I’ve just introduced you to, you can find out who’s looking for your product, why they need it, and how you can better market whatever you’re looking to launch.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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13 Market Research Tools: Best in Class for 2023

Most market research tools are designed to make it quicker and easier to find relevant data . Whatever the market, product, or purpose, the right research tools can do just that.

But, let’s be honest, some do it far better than others.

Whether you’re an enterprise firm with complex needs and a budget to suit or a smaller business needing free market research tools, read on to discover which online tools for market research are hot right now.

Note: The top market research tools list has been collated using review platforms like G2 , along with direct feedback I collected from over 500 business leaders in June, 2o22.

#1 Best overall market research tool: Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence

Most-loved feature: The Benchmarking tool

We might be a little biased, but this really is the fastest way to see how you measure up against competitors in any sector or location. Analyze market leaders and rising stars to unpack and track their digital success instantly.

Quick Explainer

Similarweb Research Intelligence is a single source of truth for the online world. Giving any business the ability to quickly analyze the online aspects of any industry or market in an instant. It displays critical insights in a way that makes it easy to view trends, competitive performance, audience insights, growth opportunities, and more. It’s the only market research analysis tool that brings together data from desktop, mobile web, and apps to provide a complete view of the digital landscape.

Key abilities

• Competitive benchmarking
• Market research
• Company research tool
• Audience analysis
• Consumer journey tracker
• Mobile app intelligence

Freemium Version: Yes, there is a lite version of the product that provides limited data for a single user, and a single location.

Free Trial: Yes, there’s a 7-day trial available. Try it out here .

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay monthly or annually for a subscription. Different levels are available, and each package is tailored. Review pricing and plans for Similarweb here.

Like what you’ve seen so far?

See our market-leading digital research tool in action in this quick 2-minute clip.

#2 Best free market research tool: Think with Google

Most-loved feature: Find my Audience

A way to discover new audiences on YouTube based on things like habits, interests, and intended plans to purchase.

Think with Google is a suite of digital research tools that curate resources from a huge pool of data across the web. It presents them as insights that aren’t typically available elsewhere. It’s a unique way to view trends, insights, and stats. Data isn’t offered in real-time but serves more as a library of figures and facts that take the form of articles, videos, interviews, case studies, and more. In addition to being a place people can go for forward-looking perspectives and data, there are several tools designed to help marketers.

Key functions

• High-level insights into most local or national markets
• Behind the scenes look at cross-platform digital campaigns
• Consumer insights
• Deck-ready stats (not in real-time)
• A range of tools to inform marketing objectives and actions

Freemium Version: The entire suite of market intelligence tools is free.

Free Trial: As a free market research tool, no trial is needed.

Ongoing Subscription: You can subscribe to a newsletter, but not the product.

#3 Best digital research tool for content and FAQ development: Answer the Public

Most-loved feature: Search listening alerts

A pro feature that sends you weekly emails that indicate how search behaviors shift over time. It takes the specific phrase or keywords you’re tracking in the platform and updates you weekly.

Quick Explainer 

Discover the questions people are asking online about key terms, products, or services. It’s designed to help content teams and website owners develop new content ideas, and relevant FAQs that are based on the types of queries people ask online.

• Track important keywords and phrases
• Get weekly emails about changes in search behavior
• Enter any keyword to uncover relevant questions or search terms
• Folders to help organize your research

Freemium Version: Yes. You get a limited number (3) of searches per day.

Free Trial: No.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes. You can pay monthly or annually for this service. Pay-monthly fees are a flat rate of $99. Discounts are offered for yearly subscriptions.

#4 Best tool for market research surveys: SurveyMonkey

Most-loved feature: Question bank

A library of hundreds of questions, pre-written by survey methodologists.

As far as market research surveys go, it’s the leading online research tool for surveys worldwide. With plans to suit the individual through to the enterprise, it’s a feature-rich, easy-to-use platform that encompasses creation, collection, and analysis under one roof. Surveys are optimized for any device and integrate with platforms like Zoom, Salesforce, Marketo, and more.

Key functions 

• Create and send unlimited surveys, quizzes, and polls
• Pop-up online surveys
• Mobile app access to create, send and analyze surveys on-the-go
• Team collaboration function (unlocked with a team plan)
• Survey builder
• Customization and branded surveys (available with advantage or premier plans only)

Freemium Version: Yes

Free Trial: Occasionally, free trials are offered for premium plans.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay annually or monthly. There are three different plans to choose from, ranging from $25 to $129 per month.

Helpful: Check out our blog and see 18 different ways to use market research surveys .

#5 Best online research tool for marketplaces: Similarweb Shopper Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Cross-shopping analysis

Cross-shopping analysis shows you how loyal a segment of customers is to a brand, along with what other brands they browsed or bought from. Uncover competitors and discover new partnership opportunities; these are game-changing insights if you sell on any marketplace.

Similarweb Shopper Intelligence is a type of online market research tool that helps you uncover and analyze browsing and buying behavior across marketplaces. Using its data, businesses can track category, product, and brand performance with ease. It helps ecommerce organizations to detect potential threats, unearth new product or category opportunities, discover new potential partnerships, and optimize search strategy and performance.

• Monitor consumer demand for any product, brand, or category
• Retail search strategy optimization
• Consumer behavior insights
• Track cross-shopping, loyalty, and purchase frequency
• Analyze brand awareness

Note: This solution uses a unique data methodology via multiple networks and partnerships. At the time of writing, there is no other consumer behavior insights tool for market research that offers this quality of data for marketplaces.

Freemium Version: No.

Free Trial: Yes. There is usually a 7-day trial available here .

Ongoing Subscription: The price is determined by things like the number of categories and/or domains you want to access. Each quote is customized to a client’s specific needs.

Want to know a little more?

Watch this quick clip to see the best ecommerce digital market research tool in action.

#6 Best market research tool for brand tracking: Latana

Most-loved feature: MoE (margin of error) Readings

To deliver transparency on data confidence levels, Latana’s dashboard includes a feature that allows clients to toggle-on, or toggle-off, margin of error (MoE) readings on all data points. These are highlighted using a traffic-light system of confidence (red=low confidence, orange=medium confidence, and green=high confidence). This small feature makes a big impact — it helps clients to correctly interpret the data and to visibly see quality shortcomings.

Latana is a B2C brand tracking tool that provides granular insights about online audiences. It helps organizations understand how key segments of consumers feel about brands and portrays relevant standings vs. industry rivals.

• Focus on niche consumer segments that matter to your business
• Uncover rival’s audience data and identify opportunities to grow
• Understand brand perception, and track how it changes over time
• Discover the most well-known brands in your industry
• Track rival’s brand awareness across gender, age income, location, and education
• Find out the main purchase drivers for your industry
• Infrastructure gives reach to over 6 billion smartphone users globally for representative brand opinions

I caught up with Latana’s CMO, Angeley Mullens. Here’s what she has to say about their offering.

Ongoing Subscription: Pricing for Latana isn’t available online. All packages are tailored to individual brands and their specific needs.

Enjoy 360 Visibility 24/7

Get the data you need to adapt to market changes and industry trends in an instant.

#7  Best research tool for social media listening: Hootsuite

Most-loved feature: Multi-channel insights

It’s a legacy feature, but one which makes it the best online research tool for social listening and monitoring. Having the ability to easily schedule posts, ad campaigns, and handle responses for every social media channel from within a single platform is what makes this a market-leading digital research tool.

Hootsuite continues to claim the number 1 spot on G2’s list of digital research tools for social media monitoring . It’s a tool to help you manage all aspects of business social media, across multiple channels, in a single platform. As well as being able to manage your socials, it also keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends and activities of your rival’s social media channels.

• Publish and schedule social media posts
• Measure cross-platform results
• Message management
• Social media trend analysis
• Social media ad-campaign management

Freemium Version: Yes. You can get a free version that supports 2 social accounts and 1 user.

Free Trial: Yes. A 30-day free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: There are four plans; professional, team, business, and enterprise; ranging from $49-$739.

#8 Best digital research tool for prospecting: Similarweb Sales Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Insights generator tool

The insights generator shows you unique facts for your prospects and accounts; with complete visibility into their digital strategy and performance. It’s ideal for refining sales and marketing efforts while staying focused on growth.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence helps organizations find viable prospects by showing you who to reach out to, when to do it, and how to capture their attention. The lead generator tool helps you find the right prospects, and key insights help create engaging outreach emails. For sales departments, ecommerce and mar-tech sectors, this type of digital research tool can take prospecting and engagement to a completely new level; along with revenue and growth.

Key functions: 

• Lead generation and enrichment
• Digital insights for 100M+ ecommerce websites, publishers, and advertisers
• Fraud detection
• Sales engagement
• SFDC integration

Free Trial: Yes, if you would like a free trial, please request that here.

Ongoing Subscription: Prices for this digital market research tool varies depending on the package and options chosen. Grab a live demo of the product and get a tailored quote here .

Insightful : If you’re looking at market research tools for the ecommerce industry, bookmark our Ecommerce Trends and Predictions for 2023 to read later.

#9 Best market research analysis tool for data visualization: Tableau

Most-loved feature : Connects to almost any data source

As a clear market leader, and a no-brainer for larger organizations with business intelligence analytics and teams. Tableau leads the way in online research tools for data visualization. It connects to a huge range of data sources and pulls information into a highly-appealing dashboard that is designed to make it easier and faster to explore and manage data . It takes data from platforms like Similarweb, then combines it with other data sources before presenting crisp, clear, insights that have the power to shape strategies and drive key transformations.

• Lightning-fast analytics
• Smart dashboards for richer insights
• Live connection to almost any data source, with automatic updates
• Drag-and-drop style UI: easy to use

Freemium Version: No. However, students and teachers get a year’s free access to the platform.

Free Trial: Yes. You can subscribe to a free 30-day trial.

Ongoing Subscription: Most plans are offered annually, with prices ranging from $15 per month upwards. The price depends on whether you use their hosted or on-premise versions, the number of users, and the inclusion of specific plugins.

#10 Best market research tool for UX testing: Loop11

Most-loved feature: Online usability testing

This feature analyzes the usability of a website with users performing live tasks on a site. It helps you understand user behavior, and shows how and why a website is used.

Loop11 is a market research tool that provides usability testing to help organizations build better websites and products. It comes with a pack of useful features that provide both moderated and unmoderated testing, helping businesses to find the right audience to test prototypes and products. It’s designed to help you see how appealing a product is to a particular audience, determine their preferences, then build these insights into a design.

• Ability to test across multiple devices, including tablet, mobile, or desktop
• User-friendly test builder that requires no coding
• Easy-to-add surveys that collect psychographic and demographic data
• Provides useful metrics like time on task, task completion rates, and NPS
• Mapping of customer journeys during a test period

Free Trial: Yes, a 14-day trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: All plans come with the option to pay monthly or annually. Prices range from $199-$599 per month.

#11 Best research tool for measuring customer experience: Temper

Most-loved feature: Rating stream

See real-time feedback as customers respond to questions via website or email channels. The stream provides a detailed view of ratings, comments, locations, referrers, email addresses, and more.

Temper allows any company to find out how customers feel about their product at all times. It directly provides first-party data to a business, preventing the need to design and distribute complex surveys. It can be placed as a widget on the site or in emails, and questions are asked to gain real-time feedback from visitors and customers alike.

• Easily deploy questions across website and email channels
• Quickly spot poor experiences to identify problematic areas of a business or product
• The rating graph gives you a real-time view of results for any question asked
• Public rating wall shows how you’re performing, instilling confidence and trust
• Ratings come with open text fields to give additional context to responses
• Referrer data gives you the ability to segment feedback and relative performance
• Tracking variables let you send data with ratings, such as order numbers, user IDs, etc.
• User targeting lets you determine who sees questions and how often they see them

Freemium Version: There is no freemium version. However, their hobby plan gives you a slimmed-down version of the product and costs $12 per month.

Ongoing Subscription: Four plans are available, ranging from hobbyist to enterprise. The lowest pricing tier starts at $12 monthly, and their top-tier solution costs $199 monthly. All plans are pay-monthly, with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

#12 Best online market research tool for focus groups: Remesh

Most-loved feature: Common topics

In just a few clicks, you can view the themes and topics that are most common with your focus group across an entire session. It groups similar responses, specific phrases, and interesting responses in seconds.

Remesh facilitates live, qualitative conversations with focus groups of up to 1000 people at a time. Replicating the focus group format online delivers powerful segmentation and dynamic capabilities that speed up your time to insight and let you hold a real-time conversation at scale.

• Launch a live conversation with up to 1000 people at a time
• Organize and analyze responses in an instant
• Segment your audience based on demographic and response data
• Share visuals and text-based content with the group to get instant feedback
• The algorithm analyzes open-ended responses in real-time

Freemium Version: No

Free Trial: Yes. However, you must first book a demo with a member of their team.

Ongoing Subscription: Remesh provides custom pricing plans that can only be obtained once you’ve taken a demonstration of their platform with a member of their team.

#13 Top collaboration and documentation tool for market research: BIT.AI

Most-loved feature: Content library + smart search

While it sounds quite basic; in essence, this tool for market research professionals makes it quicker and easier to keep track, share, and store key data. Forget trawling through emails, slack, and g-docs to find files; the smart search feature helps you locate files in an instant.

A dynamic platform that helps researchers collaborate, track, share, and manage research data in a single place. This is one of the best online market research tools for those who need a place to bring together resources like websites, PDFs, articles, images, infographics, blogs, reports, videos, etc. it’s low-cost and connects to some of the most widely used tools. Being able to share multidimensional data with others, or simply keeping track of secondary market research in a single place makes it a firm favorite.

• Over 100 integrations with applications like Tableau, Miro, G-docs, Onedrive, and more
• Real-time editing and live collaboration
• Content Library
• Smart search
• Supports a huge range of content and file types

Freemium Version: Yes. Available for teams of up to 5 collaborators.

Free Trial: Yes, a free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: A range of packages are available, costing between $8-$20 monthly.

Best market research tools for startups

There is another often-forgotten set of tools used for market research that are ideal for startups. If you’ve got zero budget and a little time on your hands, you can do most types of desk research for free. Sources include:

• Company reports, case studies, and whitepapers
• Research and trade associations
• Media coverage
• Internal sales or usage reports
• Academic or scientific journals
• Government and non-government agencies
• Public library records
• Competitor websites
• Educational institutions

Helpful: Check out this article about how to do market research for a startup .

Wrapping up….

With cost and time key considerations for anyone looking at tools for market research, it’s vital to choose wisely. While free market research tools are all good and well, they won’t always serve you when you’re on a deadline or require key insights on a specific competitor, market, or product.

Similarweb helps companies win in the digital world. Whatever the market, goal, or business size, its solutions are designed to help organizations understand their market and compete and beat rivals.

Take it for a test run today. Trial any Similarweb solution free for the first 7-days using this link .

Need to know more about the ROI of Similarweb? 

What are the best market research tools for secondary research?

The internet is probably the best tool for market research there is. It’s a goldmine of secondary market research data. But beware of data validity and check your information is coming from a trusted source.

What are the best market research tools for surveys?

Survey monkey is considered the best online market research tool for surveys, but key players like Typeform and Zoho follow closely behind. Budget and features usually determine the right tool for your needs.

What are the best free market research tools?

The best free tools for market research include: Answer the Public, Think with Google, Similarweb lite, SurveyMonkey’s basic plan, and Hootsuite’s free plan.

What are the best market research tools for qualitative research?

Qualitative research includes things like focus groups, open-ended surveys, case studies, and observation research. As such, the best tool for online research like this would be something like BIT.ai’s documentation and collaboration tool. Another useful tool for qualitative market research would be an online survey provider, like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms.

What are the best market research tools for quantitative research?

As this type of research is focused more on numbers, the best quantitative market research tools include things like Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence and Tableau. Each performs a different function but works together to collect, analyze, and present data in the most useful way possible.

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The 19 Best Market Research Tools Of 2023

Market research is a crucial component of any business strategy. Here are some of the best tools you can use in your market research efforts.

Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.

That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy .

Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.

But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?

In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.

Let’s get started.

1. SurveyMonkey

One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.

Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.

It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.

• SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 25 responses per survey.
• Individual plans start at $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
• Team plans start at $25/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.

2. Typeform

Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.

With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.

Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.

The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.

• Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
• Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
• The company also offers an Enterprise plan.

3.  BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.

Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.

The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.

• 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Membership tiers start at $159/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $239/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $399/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.

4. Qualaroo

Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.

Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.

The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.

Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.

• 15-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.

SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.

It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.

You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.

Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.

• SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $16/month for Basic, $36/month for Professional, and $149/month for Team (billed annually).

Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.

Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.

With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.

• Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
• Paid plans start at $83/month for Lite, $166/month for Standard, $333/month for Advanced, and $833/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

7. Delve AI

User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.

Thanks to tools like Delve AI , it’s easier than ever to build user personas.

Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:

• Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
• Social personas based on your social audience.
• Customer personas using your customer information.
• Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.

Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.

• The company offers a free Lite plan.
• Business plans start at $71/month for Standard, $159/month for the Growth tier, and $439/month for Pro (billed annually).
• Agency plans start at $167/month for Standard, $343/month for Growth, and $687/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).

8. Sprout Social

We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.

Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.

It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.

• Free 30-day trial.
• Plans start at $249/month for Standard, $399/month for Professional, and $499/month for Advanced.
• Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.

9. Google Trends

How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.

Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.

By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.

It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.

10. Statista

If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.

It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.

From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.

• Free Basic account available.
• Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $490/month for Personal (billed annually), with more options available.

11. Qualtrics

If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics ’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.

It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:

• Panel Management : Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
• On-Demand Respondents : Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
• Product Development : Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
• Purchase Behavior : Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.

While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.

• Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
• For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.

It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.

The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.

You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.

• Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
• Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.

You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora , but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?

Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.

It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.

Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!

It’s a great tool for engaging your audience , keeping an eye on your competitors, and even developing new ideas for content, product development, and more.

• Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.

14. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.

It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.

You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.

• Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
• Paid options start at $29/month for Starter and $49/month for Pro (billed annually).
• An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.

15. Google Market Finder

Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder . This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.

There are two primary features within Market Finder:

• Test your export readiness.  By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
• Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.

Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.

16. Semrush

Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.

The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.

You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.

• Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
• Paid accounts start at $108.33/month for Pro, $208.33/month for Guru, and $416.66/month for Business (billed annually).

17. Pew Research Center

While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.

The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.

You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.

18. Exploding Topics

We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics , your business can be the one to say this.

Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.

You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.

It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.

• Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
• Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).

In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?

You can use Loop11 , a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.

Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.

It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.

• Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
• Paid plans start at $179/month for Rapid Insights, $358/month for Pro, and $533/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.

From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.

And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.

More Resources: 

• How To Calculate Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) For SEO
• Market Intelligence: What It Is & How To Use It
• Competitor Mapping: What Is It & How To Do It

Featured Image: LAONG/Shutterstock

Writer, digital marketer, and content strategist. Annabelle has 8+ years of experience in social marketing, copywriting, and storytelling for best-in-class ...

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The 13 Best Market Research Tools

Jan 3, 2024

10 min. read

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

Think with google, ubersuggest, surveymonkey, answer the public, brandmentions, heartbeat ai, u.s. census bureau.

Tip: Also take a look at the top secondary research companies out there.

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.

See Meltwater Radarly live in action by requesting a free tour of our platform. Simply fill out the form at the bottom of this post and we'll be in touch.

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.

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 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.

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, a popular k eyword 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.

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 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.

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 .

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.

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.

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 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.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

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How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

What Are Consumer Insights? Meaning, Examples, Strategy

Market Intelligence 101: What It Is & How To Use It

Consumer Intelligence: Definition & Examples

Secondary Research Guide: Definition, Methods, Examples

What Is Desk Research? Meaning, Methodology, Examples

Top Secondary Market Research Companies | Desk Research Companies

How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry. The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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The 24 Best Market Research Tools & Software in 2024

Author & Editor at ProProfs

Shivani Dubey specializes in crafting engaging narratives and exploring Customer Experience Management intricacies. She writes on vital topics like customer feedback, emerging UX and CX trends, and sentiment analysis.

Market research tools have been at the heart of every business’s success. In a world where competition seems to be never-ending, knowing the ins and outs of your target market is more crucial than ever. 

According to a study conducted by PwC , companies that benchmark can achieve 69% faster growth and 45% greater productivity as compared to those that don’t. 

Market research has enabled organizations to uncover not only some of the biggest revelations about the market but also the tiniest details that most people miss. Market research helps organizations read between the lines and make informed decisions, which makes the process ever so important. 

Thankfully, in the 21st century, we do not require an insider to give us data about the market in the name of research. We now have some of the world-class software tools at our fingertips that would enable us to truly improve, evolve and empower our products and services for the people. 

In this blog, we’ve included a list of 12 of the best market research software and tools out there with some of the key details that you should know before making a decision to choose the one for you. 

But first, let’s take a closer look at what market research actually is.

The 24 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

There are plenty of online market research software tools that you can choose from. Here is a list of 12, which the users think very highly of:

Market research tool # 1.  Qualaroo

Qualaroo is the best market research tool and one of the best  online survey software  out there for conducting market research. It provides users with a market research platform that is easy to use and also offers actionable insights.

Qualaroo also helps you  develop user personas  through  advanced targeting , which helps you better  understand your users  and easily track their goals & behavior patterns.    

• Easy to set up and can instantly start taking feedback.
• Professionally designed survey templates to ask just the right questions.
• Catches your visitors in real-time with context for valuable responses. 
• Users can easily determine who and where the survey targets are
• Can help create detailed  customer journey maps . 
• Ask for product/website/app feedback from the audience based on engagement. 
• Supports branching logic to easily go through the redundant users. 
• Integrates with popular tools like Hubspot, Zapier, and Slack. 
• Perfect for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
• Helps to gather user experience (UX) feedback at every stage of the design process for any product.
• You can test prototype templates through unobtrusive pop-up surveys called Nudges™.
• Makes analyzing customer sentiments and open-ended survey results easier through the sentiment analysis engine
• Needs more filters and export options for the reports.
• Lacks a bulk action button in the survey dashboard.

Pricing:   Starts from $69 per month.

Market research tool # 2.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a free market research tool that presents data in the form of trend lines from all over the internet. When you enter a specific term into Google Trends, it will give you an accurate representation of how trendy that term has been over the course of time and also gives it a score out of 100.

• Shows the frequency of your searched term in Google with respect to the website’s total search volume over a given period of time.
• Refines your search by adding location filters.
• Presents the trend graphically for better visualization of the result.
• Easy to respond to surveys on any device, including mobile, tablets, and computers. 
• Integrates with popular tools such as  Zapier , Automate.io, and Integromat. 
• Data is generated into organized Google Sheets that can be instantly presented without making any alterations. 
• Useful tool to acquire keyword-related and geographic data about the users.
• Instantly uncover any search spikes due to special events for a search.
• Sometimes shows irrelevant results for a searched term.
• Shows only relative numbers, so a comparison analysis is necessary.

Pricing:  Free to use

Market research tool # 3.  SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is another market research software that offers new market research techniques and provides different ways to customers for voicing their opinions. They have combined an enterprise-grade platform with a suite of specialized market research and customer experience solutions to ensure that the power of feedback can be given to organizations of all sizes. 

• Professionally built question bank to ask accurate questions.
• Personalized survey techniques like skip logic, branching logic, etc.
• AI-powered analysis tool to get expert feedback on the survey draft. 
• Test creative concepts by asking the right set of questions from the right audience. 
• Ensures quality of data gathered from over 144 million users worldwide.
• Ability to get help from market research experts and dedicated accounts managers with the flexible engagement model.
• Potential to monitor market dynamics of a specific product category over time.
• Easily design recurring surveys to track sentiments with time.
• Embed survey questions into emails to improve response rates.
• Provides accurate context from the updated benchmark data.
• Analytical dashboard needs improvement to make data presentation better.
• Sometimes glitches a little while designing surveys.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/user/month. 

Market research tool # 4.  Statista

Statista is one of the top market research tools that specializes in data visualization and market research. It picks up data from reputable reports that are present all over the internet and makes them easy to comprehend and digest for researchers and other users. It can find the specific data relating to your industry and create a statistical report on it, which would be much easier to understand. 

• Ability to filter content based on a specific type. 
• Hundreds of metrics to choose from and the ability to customize visualizations.
• Also features forecasts and surveys reports.
• Flexibility to analyze the markets across 150+ countries. 
• Presents global stories and statistics in a vividly visualized manner. 
• Ability to conduct Global Consumer Surveys to understand what drives the consumers. 
• Can integrate with other marketing tools by simply copying the HTML code. 
• Great tool for portraying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand the consumer market outlook.
• Helps research and gather information about the companies like their headquarters, the number of employees, and revenue performance.
• Can be challenging to find relevant data for long-tail search terms.

Pricing:  Starts at $39/month

Market research tool # 5.  Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool is a highly sophisticated  market research software and analysis tool  that acts as a window into the behavior of customers when searching online. Google Keyword tool provides valuable insights into queries that your target audience is searching on google.

It acts as an accurate product research tool that tells you what the customers are looking for. To use it, you need to create a free Google Adword account.

• Shows you the volume of keyword searches.
• Lets you filter keyword searches based on location and language.
• Lets you filter searches based on the device that people use to search.
• Helps marketers build a content strategy and marketing strategies as well. 
• Offers users insights into the current marketing trends.
• Expand long-tail efforts by discovering other important keywords in the same domain.
• Integrates with other tools using Google API.
• Shows the relationship between different keywords to help you find targeted related keywords.
• Excellent tool to understand the competitiveness of the keywords.
• Shows fewer keyword suggestions than other similar tools.
• Needs more keyword filters in the dashboard.

Pricing:  Free to use.

Market research tool # 6.  Tableau Software

Tableau is a business intelligence suite for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. Tableau uses analytics, visualization, and business intelligence to present the data in a visually appealing fashion for a better understanding.

It aims to transform the way we see and use data to make decisions. Tableau empowers its users with the help of its highly sophisticated market research tools to make the best out of their data. 

• Lets you visualize data on anything.
• Can easily extract data from PDFs, Excel, text, Python, SAS, and many more.
• Tableau dashboard provides a comprehensive and wholesome view of your data.
• Enables the marketing team to directly access the data from different formats.
• Visualizes the market research data to generate actions and make quick decisions. 
• Natively integrates with other market research tools like Qualtrics and Salesforce. 
• Flexible team collaboration and data sharing options.
• Makes it easy to connect with live data sources to stay up to date. 
• Offers data heat maps to give a general sense of the emerging patterns in the market.
• Can be an expensive tool for some businesses.
• You may need help from the IT department to set up the tool.

Pricing:  Starts at $70/user/month.

Market research tool # 7.  Typeform

Typeform is another market research software and online survey tool that allows you to conduct market research surveys to get a direct response from your targeted audience. It has a built-in photo and video libraries and a wide range of design themes to choose from. Typeform primarily aims to create people-friendly forms by making them appealing, which would gather more responses and better insights.

• Shows the viewers one form field at a time. 
• Easy to use and optimize for mobile devices.
• Let’s you create a wide range of question types. 
• Make the form uniquely yours with a wide range of customization options.
• Integrates with other tools like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Slack, etc.
• The drag and drop feature allows users to create forms within minutes.
• Variety of question types including multiple-choice, rating, opinion scale, free-form text, and many more.
• Creating conversational and casually approached surveys. 
• Gathering demographics of the customers to understand their behavior patterns. 
• Creating positioning strategy through survey results. 
• Survey design options need more flexibility and customization options.
• It would be good if there were more filters in the reporting dashboard.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/month.

Market research tool # 8.  SEMrush

SEMrush is another very effective market research software tool that marketers use to boost their conversion rates. It has over 40 tools under its portfolio that can be used to attract more visitors and increase conversions. 

This tool primarily aims at improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights by offering services like SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR,  Content Marketing , Marketing Insights, analytical tools for market research , Campaign Management.

• Provides tools like keyword research, on-page SEO, and local SEO.
• Easily monitor and manage organic rankings.
• Provides tools for content marketing, creation, distribution, optimization,
• It’s the best  tool for market analysis . 
• Lets you explore and analyze the demographics of competitors in the market. 
• Determine how to market competitors earn their traffic and also estimate your market share. 
• Integrates with popular Google and social networking applications. 
• The technical audit report gives in-depth suggestions for site optimization.
• One of the best enterprise-level tools.
• Provides a plethora of segmentation options for keyword suggestions to find the right keywords.
• Training docs can be hard to navigate. It can be hard to find what you are looking for.
• Backlink suggestions dashboard can be improved. Sometimes, it misses a lot of backlinks.

Pricing:  Starts at $119.95/month. 

Market research tool # 9.  Ahrefs

Ahref is also the top  tool for business research  or market research that offers a fully-packaged suite of  conversion rate optimization tools  is Ahrefs. It is an extremely diverse software that has tons of functionality and can easily make anyone an SEO expert. It is an extremely powerful tool for backlinks, SEO analysis, and also managing your SEO health over time.

• Ranks keywords with respect to their level of difficulty and traffic potential. 
• Conduct site audits to understand the weak links and boost the conversion rates.
• Conducts keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
• Finds content that performs well on a given topic.
• Tons of different metrics to measure the data on.
• Integrates with tools like Tray.io and Rank Ranger using Ahrefs API
• Provides insights into competitors’ organic search and backlinking profiles on different websites.
• Helps to find the most optimized and well-performing content to generate new ideas and analyze competitors’ content.
• Coes with a slight learning curve. Needs inline tooltips in the product menus for quick access.
• PPC features need some optimization.

Starts at $83/month, billed annually 

Pricing:  Starts at $99/user/month.

Market research tool # 10.  Upwave (Formerly Survata)

Upwave, formerly Survata, is one of the best analytics and market research platforms to help you measure the effects of your brand advertising efforts. You can use the inbuilt dashboard to track every campaign across various channels and optimize them to improve ROI. The data from Upwave has been featured in brands like Forbes, USA Today, CBS News, and The New York Times.

• Track and optimize brand advertisement to improve brand awareness.
• Get real-time updates about outperforming aspects of every campaign to run timely optimization.
• Receive email notifications to get refreshed reports directly in your inbox.
• Provides automated tracking of different demographic & behavioral profiles in each campaign.
• You can see how accurately each campaign is reaching the target audience across various channels.
• Create customer dashboards to monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Leverages AI-based Upwave Customer Forecast feature to predict brand lift and customer acquisition for your campaigns.
• Track market penetration, i.e., the percentage of the target audience you reached for any campaign.
• You can estimate customer acquisition numbers to study the effectiveness of your brand marketing campaigns and make changes.
• Needs more filters to include other behavioral traits in the dashboards.
• Dashboard UI can be overwhelming for new users.

Contact for a quote

Market research tool #11.  AnswerThePublic

Answer the public is the best software for market research according to their home page, ‘There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before”.  AnswerThePublic is responsible for listening to autocomplete data from search engines and cranking out every useful phrase or question that people are asking about a given keyword.

• Helps you get a sense of what the people are really asking for. 
• Gives you the context behind every search. 
• Very easy to use and digestible for beginners. 
• Listens to autocomplete data from search engines like Google and cranks out useful phrases and questions. 
• Also acts as a goldmine for consumer insights, and the data can be used to create extremely useful content and product.
• Integrates with other popular applications to generate more insights. 
• An excellent tool for insights, validation, creativity, and creating content strategies.
• Word Cloud feature is fantastic to visualize related keywords and their relationships.
• Helps to uncover the untapped potential of search demands for different queries.
• The database is constantly updated to help you spot new trends, slang, and topics.
• Sometimes, the results become less relevant when you search for more than two keywords simultaneously.
• It’s challenging to find keywords for niche markets.

Market research tool #12:  Social Mention

Social Mention is one of the  best tools for market research  that digs through 100+ social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and many more, to determine the number of times your brand or keyword has been mentioned. It has the ability to accurately track and measure what people are saying about your brand.

• Displays how much your keyword crops on all social media platforms.
• Distinguishes between positive and negative sentiments.
• Gives a general overview of the customer’s perception of your brand. 
• Users can determine the overall footprint of their brand and make informed decisions.
• Supports simple integration with popular social media applications for more meaningful data.
• You can also determine the number of people talking about your keyword at any given time. 
• You can set up alerts for more minor updates using tags within broader categories.
• Consolidates the data from all over the internet under one dashboard for real-time monitoring.
• Makes it easy to research specific domains where the audience is looking.
• The UI can be updated to improve navigation for new users.

Market research tool # 13. Think With Google

Think With Google is a one-stop information resource to monitor customer behavior, get marketing insights, and view the latest industry trends. It offers several tools to find the right demographic audience for your business, test and optimize your website, and track real-time consumer behavior across any location. So, if you are looking for the best market research resources, this is the one to go for.

• Run a site audit on your domain and get custom tips on improving site speed, UX, and other aspects.
• Lets you search trends and actionable consumer insights for specific locations.
• Track emerging technologies to plan the future of your marketing strategies.
• Benchmark your website against industry standards with a simple test.
• Use Google Trends to discover trending topics, latest stories, and other hot topics.
• Free-to-use online repository to explore new markets, find the right audience, and access global consumer behavioral data.
• No advanced features to find information on sub-categories or niche markets.

Market research tool # 14. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing and researching platform to produce high-performing content. You can do keyword research, competitive analysis, brand monitoring, and more to grow your business. The platform also offers a chrome extension to make the job easier.

• Find the target keywords to design your content based on monthly search volume, cost per click, and other parameters.
• Track viral trends in real-time for any domain, topic, and location.
• Track new content around your target keywords to design your SEO strategies.
• Find the most popular influencers worldwide for any topic to sponsor them for your brand.
• Set alerts for desired keywords, blogs, brand mentions, competitors, and influencers.
• Track backlinks to your domain from all over the internet.
• One of the best tools for social listening and keyword research.
• The Chrome extension is an excellent addition to one-tap monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Doesn’t monitor the content or engagement data for Instagram posts.
• Needs more filters to separate news and general topics.

Starts @ $79/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 15. Make My Persona

If you are new to building a buyer or user persona , then MakeMyPersona is your tool. It’s a simple market research software from HubSpot that creates a buyer persona based on the data you enter into the form. Just fill in the details, and you get a ready-to-use persona template to study different customer segments. And it’s free.

• Uses demographic and psychographic details of your target audience to build a buyer persona.
• It asks for details like age, organization’s size, job title, goals, challenges, etc.
• You can also add new sections manually, if necessary.
• Download and export the buyer persona with a click.
• Quick and easy to use to build customizable persona templates.
• Requires market data from your end. You cannot use it to find information on the target market.

Market research tool # 16. PureSpectrum Insights

PureSpectrum Insights (formerly Upwave Instant insights) is a consumer insights platform to collect market research and brand tracking data. You can create surveys and questionnaires to ask questions to the right audience to gather valuable insights for your marketing strategies. The company also offers PureSpectrum Marketplace to help you buy samples from multiple market research panels with one click.

• Create focused research and brand tracking surveys and distribute them to the target audience.
• Target the right people based on age, gender, shopping behaviors, income, job title, and other inbuilt attributes.
• Get real-time updates about the performance of your market research campaign.
• Use the PureSpectrum marketplace to find the right target audience for your surveys.
• Track the data in real-time using detailed reporting dashboards.
• The panel service helps to get to the required sample size quickly.
• To improve data quality, you can create crosstab reports and set up significance tests in minutes.
• Limited survey options as compared to other tools.

Contact for quote

Market research tool # 17. Loop11

Loop11 is a usability testing and market research tool to build better products. You can perform usability testing, benchmarking, prototype testing , information architecture testing, and more using the same tool. It offers both moderated and unmoderated testing so you can find the right audience to test your product and prototypes. 

As an audience research tool, you can use it to see how your product appeals to your new target market, explore their preferences, and channel the insights into the design.

• Offers a user-friendly test builder to guide you at every step of designing a test. No coding is required.
• Create tasks, such as five-second, first click, tree testing, etc.
• Add surveys to your test to collect in-depth demographic and psychographic data.
• Design surveys using multiple question types like multiple-choice, single-choice, NPS, rating, and System Usability Scale (SUS).
• Run your test on any device like desktop, mobile, or tablet.
• Provides a dedicated participant panel service to find the right participants globally for your tests.
• Offers video, audio, and screen capture to collect first-hand data from users.
• Edit videos to extract useful points like adding time-stamps, assigning tags, and more.
• Track test metrics like task completion rate, lostness, time on task, and NPS scores.
• Use inbuilt behavioral analysis tools like heatmaps and clickstream to map participants’ journeys during the test.
• Offer more flexibility in annotating and sharing the clips than other similar tools.
• An inexpensive tool with a wide range of testing options.
• The participant panel offers niche filters to help you target the right people for your tests.
• You cannot make changes to a test after publishing it.
• It may slow down your website a little.

Starts at $63/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 18. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is one of the most advanced experience management platforms in the market. It comprises different product suites to cover different aspects of your business. You can gauge customer satisfaction, optimize products and services, run market research campaigns, and track brand awareness from the same platform. Plus, AI-based analytics put it among the leading Market research tools to collect data for brand tracking and advertisement optimization.

• Track brand awareness through AI-based dashboards.
• Uncover the aspects that provide positive and negative brand perceptions among your audience.
• Set up automated alerts to track changes in brand signals or awareness.
• Run surveys to collect customer feedback and market research data.
• Offers 27+ deployment channels like website, app, link, email, and QR code.
• Use the drag-&-drop builder, 50+ answer types, branching logic, 100+ templates, theme customization options, rebranding, and other features to design surveys.
• Provides targeting options to target the right people.
• The iQ™ analysis engine leverages AI, machine learning, and NPL to extract data, spot opportunities, and suggest improvements automatically.
• Offers XM services to collect and manage market research data for you.
• Generate custom resorts to align your data with your business KPIs for real-time insights.
• Limited customization options for your surveys.
• It takes time to add the contract data to directories. It could be improved to make the process faster.

Market research tool # 19. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is among the most trusted and leading market research tools that offer in-depth data on different industries. You can find the top website, best apps, top trending topics, and other data around your industry. The company also offers data intelligence services to help you collect insights into your target market and audience. Plus, you can perform keyword research to find relevant keywords for your marketing strategies.

• Analyze any website and mobile app to view their ranking, total traffic, demographic targeting, competitors, marketing channels, etc.
• Uncover top keyword trends based on organic vs. paid search, channels, traffic sources, and other attributes.
• Perform keywords research to find new keywords.
• Run benchmarks for your website against industry standards.
• Leverage the data repository to track and monitor consumer data signals from over 100 million sites worldwide.
• Explore competitive insights, global market trends, and audience behavior on domain and sub-domain levels.
• Get shopper insights to track consumer behavior across your website, marketplace listings, and app.
• Offers a Chrome extension to get quick performance insights about any open web page.
• Easy to use and navigate. The UI is intuitive and user-friendly.
• Sometimes the data does not accurately represent the actual insights.
• Poses a learning curve for new users. Could benefit from a detailed knowledge base.

Market research tool # 20. Userlytics

Userlytics is one of the best tools for market research and user testing. You can easily conduct remote usability testing to align your products with the target audience. It also lets you collect information about your participants and interact with live conversations to gather in-depth market data without the hassle of arranging personal interviews, making it a perfect online market research tool.

• Choose from a plethora of test types like tree testing, card sorting, usability testing, prototype testing, and more.
• Use the tests to find the right product-market fit, test products, and conduct in-depth market research.
• Offers features like multiple question types, branching logic, rebranding, multi-language support, and others to create targeted tasks.
• Use built-in targeting options to select the right audience for your tests.
• Provides picture-in-picture recording to view how participants perform the tasks.
• Choose your own participants or access Userlytics’ panel services to select your target audience.
• Offers advanced dashboards to track metrics like NPS scores, time on tasks, and success/failure rate.
• The Global participant panel with inbuilt filters makes it easy to find the right audience.
• The feedback editing tool lets you create highlight reels, bookmark, download, tag, share, and rate the transcripts to extract valuable insights.
• The panel credits needed to recruit participants cannot be shared with other users within the same company. So, you have to buy more credits for each separate account.
• It can be expensive for small businesses.

Subscription plans start at $399/month. billed annually

Market research tool # 21. Temper

Temper is among the more straightforward feedback and audience research tools that let you collect user insights and other important data about your products and services. With simple surveys on different web pages, you can measure customer satisfaction, collect demographic and behavioral data on your target audience, gauge customer experience, and do more. 

The tool is perfect for small businesses getting started with market research resources or creating a feedback loop.

• Create and add survey widgets to your website and email.
• You can show the widget as a page pop-up or embed it into the page.
• Provides multiple question types like NPS, emoji, free-text, rating scale, and more.
• Fetches respondents’ meta-data to build your market research resources.
• Add custom tracking variables to pull other user data like email address, user ID, order number, etc.
• Offers inbuilt targeting options to show the widget to the right audience.
• In-built sentiment analysis dashboard to show overall sentiment score for each campaign.
• Beautiful dashboard to view scores with time and track any changes in real-time.
• The dashboard is simple but intuitively designed to display all the data without appearing overwhelming.
• Custom tracking is an excellent way to identify logged-in users and quickly act on their feedback.
• Lacks more question types offered by other similar tools.
• No advanced tools for quick data analysis.

Starts at $12 month

Market research tool # 22. BrandMentions

If you want to know what people are saying about your brand, BrandMentions is the perfect tool. It’s a great market analysis tool to instantly search every corner of the internet and track brand engagements. From social listening to competitor spying, you can do it all and more with this feature-packed platform.

• Track aggregated social mentions across various social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Respond to people’s brand mentions from the dashboard to build an online community.
• Find and connect with the right influencers to fuel your marketing efforts.
• Monitor Hashtag performance across different channels.
• Run sentiment analysis of all the brand mentions and track the overall sentiment tone of people about your brand.
• Perform competitive analysis to analyze how your rivals are performing on the internet.
• Track your competitors’ brand mentions, social shares, and other data to identify their most popular channels.
• Set alerts for trending topics and news to stay on top of optimizing your business strategies.
• The UI is simple to use and navigate.
• Set real-time alerts for negative mentions to take quick action and build brand reputation.
• The initial setup takes time. We recommend consulting tutorials or help guides.
• Needs a bigger integration stack to export/import data to other workspace tools.

Starts at $99/month

Market research tool # 23. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit for keyword research and competitive analysis to grow your business. You can find new target keywords, create new content ideas, and track competitors’ websites with a click. The business research tool also offers a Blog Marketplace to help you find the top freelance SEO writers for your blogs.

Features 

• Offers AI-based content assistant to auto-generate optimal titles, headers, introductions, word counts, images, and more for your blog posts.
• Use the inbuilt dashboard to view related keywords, difficulty scores, and suggestions for any keyword.
• Track DA, targeted keywords, Google and Facebook Ads, backlinks, and other data for any competitor website.
• Access the Blog Marketplace to find the right freelance writers to publish quality blogs.
• Offers Chrome extension to get SEO insights about any open webpage without leaving the browser.
• The AI-based content assistant comes in handy to generate optimized content outlines in minutes.
• Cannot do advanced SEO research like other similar tools.
• No option to track broken links.

Starts at $29/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 24. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another market research tool to generate new keyword ideas for your campaigns. You just need to enter a domain or keyword. The tool shows keywords suggestions, monthly volume, and other data to help you identify the best opportunities for the target keyword. UberSuggest was acquired by Neil Patel, who has since expanded its feature list significantly.

• Generate long-tail and short-tail keywords ideas for your target keyword.
• Track metrics for each keyword like monthly search volume, PPC competition, average CPC, SEO competition, and more.
• Track top-ranking pages for any target keywords with estimated traffic, social share, and domain scores for each website.
• You can also analyze any domains for traffic, domain score, organic keywords, backlink score, and other useful information.
• Provides an SEO analyzer to run Site Audit and speed tests on your website and show suggestions to optimize it.
• The free version offers all the features to generate new keyword ideas.
• Uses location-based data to enhance data accuracy.
• Offers Word-Cloud keyword display to help you identify relevant keywords around the target term.
• Lacks several technical SEO features.
• Show limited results for niche target markets.
• No custom reporting option.

Free. Paid plans start at $12/month

Must-Have Features in Market Research Tools

You have already come across what market research software tools can do and how they are useful to marketers. But what makes a market research tool great and desirable? Let’s take a look at some of the features that every market research online tool should have

1. Identifying the Target Audience

Each step in the process of market research is crucial, but it stems from identifying your target audience in the initial stages. The inability to identify the right target audience would automatically result in the market research being void and halt the process entirely.  Therefore, a market research tool should, first and foremost, be able to fetch you the right set of audience to ask the questions from.

2. Creating a Research Questionnaire

The step that follows the identification of the target audience is the creation of a research questionnaire that will fetch you the answers that you are looking for. 

A good market research tool should provide users the ability to draft questions that: 

• Make the surveys engaging 
• Keep the surveys short 
• Always ask the right questions

3. Sharing Your Research Questionnaire

Another must-have feature of any market research tool is the ability to share the research questionnaire on multiple platforms through different channels. The flexibility of sharing your research questionnaire on different platforms is directly correlated to gathering accurate and significant data.

Respondents should be given the ability to opt for platforms that are convenient to them, like emails, social media, web links, SMS shares , and many more.

4. Collecting Data and Creating Information

A good market research tool should always be able to collect raw data and process it in such a way that it gives valuable information to the researcher. This is where an analysis tool comes in. 

The analysis conducted by the research tool should give actionable market insights by analyzing the data on a granular level and presenting it with the help of a robust reporting system.

Final Tips for Conducting Market Research

At this point, you are well aware of how important ongoing market research is for the organization’s long-term success. But even if you fully understand the depths of market research, you need to leverage it effectively. 

For that, here are some of the quick tips that would be useful for you while conducting market research:

1. Context Is Everything

Data is everywhere, yet so little of it is of any use. Even with tons of invaluable information at our fingertips, we often are clueless as to how we should use them. Understanding the true meaning and the reasoning behind the information is what makes research complete. 

As a good researcher, you should always be aware of the possibilities and limitations out there and harness the vast potential of information out there to paint a clear picture in the form of market research.

This can be done by always trying to look beyond the data points and asking questions to understand the actual meaning around the data.

Also Read: How To Measure Customer Satisfaction In Context

2. Make It Personal

When it comes to interpreting the data, you should always try and engage with the researchers and the analysts to understand how the data would be applicable to your organization. Market research is not about reading recorded visuals and texts or purchasing a report card and moving on. 

There is a vast amount of information captured on a daily basis that does not make it to a publication and remains unused. Research is often widely applicable, which is why you should personally engage with research personnel or analysts who work behind the scenes to curate the research.

Asking them the right questions about the applicability of research would give you a much better understanding.

Remember, Research Is an Ongoing Process

We live in an ever-changing society, where the consumer’s needs and market trends change at a rapid pace. In order to analyze and interpret those trends and consumers’ needs, you need to study them on a regular basis. Research needs to be an ongoing process with no inevitable end to ensure that you always stay ahead of the curve at any given point in time.

Ask the Right Questions

Before starting with your marketing research, you need to have your objectives in place. These objectives act as a blueprint for your research and would guide you towards successful market research. 

While focusing on the core objective, you would need to derive the right set of questions that would gather the specific data needed to fulfill your research. Here is a quick example of questions that can be applied in your research:

To understand how your visitors came to know about you

• How did you find our website?
• What search term did you use to find our website?
• What was the first thing you found out about us?

Understanding the purpose of your visitors

• What brings you to this website today?
• What product or service are you looking for?

Understanding the exit intent

• What is preventing you from signing up?
• What is preventing you from starting a trial?
• What could we do to make this site more useful?

Related Read – To know more about the survey questions, have a look at What Survey Questions Should I Ask?

Reflect on the Insights

Conducting market research is not the end of the process. The important bit is what comes afterward. Sharing the research data with your team and other organization members is the ideal thing to do when it comes to interpreting it. 

You can also use the analytical tool provided in the market research software that would comprehensively decipher the data and give you a bird’s-eye view. This is how reflecting on the data would give you the ability to make critical decisions.

Ultimately, market research will always be considered as a highly sophisticated way of gaining insights and answers that will eventually reduce business risk and ensure overall success.

Research success can always be determined by comparing your discoveries with the business objectives. Proper deployment of market research tools is one of the biggest enablers of this success.

With that being said, you have been enlightened with some of the best market research tools out there. All you need to do now is evaluate your needs and map them with the tool that can make it happen for your business by helping you develop what your customers need.

About the author

Shivani dubey.

Shivani has more than 3 years of experience in the modern creative content paradigm and technical writing verticals. She has been published in The Boss Magazine, Reseller Club, and HR Technologist. She is passionate about Artificial Intelligence and has a deep understanding of how organizations can leverage customer support technologies for maximum success. In her free time, she enjoys Nail art, playing with her guinea pigs, and chilling with a bowl of cheese fries.

19 best market research software tools for 2024

Last updated

25 March 2024

Reviewed by

Whether you're marginally satisfied with your current market research software or are venturing out to find your first software option, keep reading. In this article, we'll share some of the best market research tools available for 2023. Based on user reviews, affordability, and efficiency, these are the top considerations your company should look into for market research software.

Market analysis template

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

• Different types of market research software

Since there are several types of market research, there are different types of market research software solutions. Before you begin your hunt for the best-fit software, recognize what type of market research you do most.

Determine which metrics are the most valuable to your company. Work out if this key data is best gathered via a consumer survey, questionnaire , interview, or checklist form. From there, you can begin to look for various market research software options offering features and calculations that make the most sense for your needs.

Decide which types of market research matter to you, each requiring its own tools and methods:

Primary market research

Secondary market research

Quantitative research

Qualitative research

Branding research

Competitor research

Customer or client research

Product research

• Uses of market research software

As you evaluate your market research software options, start by reviewing each tool's strengths and core uses. Then, look at each through the lens of these four steps, checking how well they perform at each stage. This will also form your process when it comes to using them.

1. Identify the target audience

Know your target audience first. This might be a data pool of prospects based on your buyer personas . But it might also be an unknown segment of people if you’re conducting market research on a new region or for a new offering.

The ideal market research software will provide insights to help you identify your target audience in any scenario.

2. Create a research questionnaire

Market research software should have the capability of creating research questionnaires . These surveys are instrumental in learning more about a particular audience segment , region, or market dynamic.

3. Share your research questionnaire

Creating your market surveys and research-related questionnaires is one thing. You'll also need to share those questionnaires with participants. A great market research software tool will have additional layers of features to help you send and receive surveys.

4. Collect data and create information

A great market research software tool will also help you collect data and create usable insights from those metrics. You'll need a seamless way to gather market information and disseminate it throughout your organization in an actionable, effective way.

• Benefits of using market research software

When you harness the right market research software, prepare for some significant advantages. Automation alone makes data analytics faster. But your datasets will also be more accurate when you use software to collect and share insights.

As an added benefit for companies, researchers, and organizations, using market research software means easier report generation and the ability to spot trends and patterns in your collected data.

The bottom line: market research software tools will help you keep up with consumer behavior trends and market fluctuations, allowing you to capitalize on emerging shifts and changes.

• 19 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Based on industry reviews, effectiveness, and available features, these market research platforms and tools deserve a look. When accurate data and analysis matter, these are the solutions to have in your toolbox.

Take advantage of free trial periods and start evaluating your research tool and dashboard options.

Keep these top software solutions on your roster of must-try tools, and you'll be able to keep up with whatever's happening in your market.

Software strengths:

Precision accuracy in transcription with an advanced speech engine

Custom fields for structured data

Importable datasets

Sentiment analysis

Project templates

Access control and unlimited viewership capabilities

Flexible and customizable editing

Another market research tool worth exploring is  Qualtrics . This software solution can help you draft surveys, analyze captured data, and run statistical testing.

Qualtrics also provides a representative sample of recipients if you don't already have an audience segmented.

In addition, the platform includes training on demand if your teams need help navigating it.

Easy to create and facilitate survey processes

Top-notch dataset reporting

Ability to boost your survey audience

QuestionPro

If you want survey customization and ultimate flexibility,  QuestionPro  is a great market research tool. It uses survey logic tech to seamlessly adjust the survey in real time based on participant responses.

Choose from a variety of software plans, most of which are ideal for creating, sharing, and analyzing collected metrics.

There's also 24/7 live chat for ongoing support.

Easy to navigate and customize

The free plan is fairly robust

Analysis can be exported or carried out in the app

If you prefer visual data, such as graphs showing statistics and market research-related reports, you'll like  Statista .

Statista continuously uploads data, so you can check back on the same charts and see real-time shifts in trends. It's a good resource for consumer behavior insights and covers a broad range of market topics.

Considered one of the best statistics resources

Easy to use and navigate

Hundreds of reports and dashboards available

If your organization needs a more advanced customer survey tool and market research solution,  Qualaroo  is a great option.

The main difference between Qualaroo and other market research tools is that its surveys can be directly embedded into your website or landing page. You can catch and attract participants in real time, which makes their survey responses more valuable.

There are AI analytics tools built in, too, with plenty of features for customizing your questionnaires.

Easy to create, embed, and send surveys

Super-fast reporting turnaround capabilities

Auto language translation

Another piece of market research software worth considering is  Typeform . Explore pre-made templates in an entirely user-friendly platform. Typeform makes creating and customizing forms and surveys a breeze, especially with all the available templates.

Unlike other survey tools, Typeform only sends one question at a time, making it a participant-friendly format.

Explore Typeform as a research software tool for qualitative and quantitative data .

Brilliant visualization of your data

Mobile-optimized

Compatible with hundreds of other apps

SurveyMonkey

Nearly anyone in research or business has heard of  SurveyMonkey . It's another market research solution worth looking into, especially if you need access to 200+ survey templates for inspiration.

This platform is a breeze to navigate, much like Typeform. SurveyMonkey is more of an enterprise-grade dashboard, however, simplifying the process of creating, sending, and analyzing for all your metrics.

Easy for anyone to use

Custom reports available

Robust free plan

If you're looking for a social media marketing research tool with content marketing research features, check out  BuzzSumo . Its software will scrub and analyze billions of articles and trillions of social media engagements, assembling metrics about relevant topics, influencer targeting, and popular trends.

These types of metrics are helpful in any marketing endeavors and content creation. They’re also key in understanding the driving factors of your target consumers.

Accuracy with social sharing metrics

Ideal for competitive research

Ability to monitor mentions

Google Trends

One of the most popular market research tools, firstly because it's Google and secondly because it's free, is  Google Trends . It's not as comprehensive as some of the other tools, but it can be helpful in your research objectives.

Find topics that are popular online or review line graphs that rank widely used terms and keywords. This tool is less about conducting surveys and more about carrying out your own online research and active listening.

Discovering keywords, including long-tail keywords

Find hot-topic conversations to inspire your marketing

Visually appealing and easy to use

Bonus list of market research software tools

While the above market research tools tend to land at the top of the favorites list, there are other solutions worth considering. These are all great tools and platforms to dive into.

Evaluate the features and choose those that align best with the data you're trying to collect and analyze.

Tableau: Business intelligence suite for connecting virtually any data source

Paperform: Free-text interface and customizable surveys for all your personas

Claritas MyBestSegment: Great for digging into demographics and lifestyle habits

Upwave Instant Insights: Distributes surveys to real people, not including paid participants

Userlytics: Test prototypes, mobile apps, or website user experience and opinions

NielsenIQ: Great for evaluating product launch-related market research and data

Loop11: Test website usability and user experience metrics with your participants

Ubersuggest: Keyword and content research tool, great for competitive advantage insights

BrandMentions: Social media monitoring software and platform

Pew Research Center: Gather data regarding social media usage, political sentiments, and economic conditions

• How to choose the right market research software

The market research software tools listed in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. You'll find all kinds of innovative tools with shiny new capabilities worth exploring.

What may be more helpful is a short to-do list outlining how to go about choosing the right research market platform for your project or company. Keep these objectives in mind as you decide to adopt or upgrade your software solutions.

Know your market research objectives

Be mindful of your budget

Evaluate the ease of use for you and your teams

Look for robust data collection features

Look for analytics capabilities

Choose those that integrate with other apps and software

When evaluating the best tools, create and reference your objectives, so you know you'll make the best-fit decision.

What are examples of research tools used today?

Some of the most common market research tools used today include surveys, interviews, checklists, and questionnaires. While the methods have been around for decades, the software used to facilitate and manage these strategies has improved using technology, algorithms, and automation.

What are the four Ps of market research?

When you hear about the four Ps of market research, researchers typically mean the four categories worth researching in a particular market: price, place, product, and promotion.

Why are the different types of market research important?

Because the consumer market, or your target audience, is constantly changing how it makes decisions, interacts with brands, buys products or services, and makes recommendations to others, market research is your first line of defense in keeping up with those changes. Finding the right market research software tool will determine how effectively you collect, share, and act on those emerging shifts in consumer behavior.

The only way to stay ahead in today's consumer product and service landscape is with superior intel. And the best way to learn the very latest about industry shifts, changes in customer behavior, and user preferences is with market research. Today's market research software tools make it easy and efficient to collect all kinds of metrics and apply those insights to effect organizational or core-offering changes.

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The 8 free market research tools and resources you need to know.

With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent.  However, conducting market research isn’t an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you have access to an endless array of top-tier tools and resources, you can uncover strategy-changing insights with relative ease.

Does that mean businesses with small (or non-existent) budgets are out of luck? Absolutely not.

Nowadays, free market research tools and resources are abundant — and you’ll be familiar with eight of our favorites by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

But first, some housekeeping:

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers — both current and prospective — with the intent of optimizing your business strategy.

Customer-related information that you may want to gather includes (but is not limited to):

• The goals they want to achieve
• The pain points they want to alleviate
• The income or budget that constrains them
• The products and/or services they use (a.k.a. your competitors)
• The strengths and weaknesses of the products and/or services they use

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because — if you’re thorough and open-minded — it dramatically improves your chances of long-term success. Only through market research can you uncover the insights you need to develop a product or service that (1) satisfies the demands of your prospects and (2) stands out from the competition.

For a complete overview of how conducting market research can benefit your business, here’s Market Research Defined and How to Get Started .

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive into the good stuff.

Top 4 Free Market Research Tools

For clarity, we will define a free market research tool as any tool that:

• Costs nothing, and
• Helps with the collection and/or analysis of customer-related information

Keep in mind that “customer-related information” encompasses everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

1. Google Trends

If you want to get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions — Google Trends is an excellent tool.

All you need to do is enter a search query and toggle with the filters. As an example, take a look at the level of interest in “office supplies'' in the U.S. over the past five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest peaked in February 2020 — at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Plus, you can explore variations in interest across the 50 states, as well as related topics and queries that are surging in popularity:

The “interest by subregion” data is powerful. In Wyoming, searches for “office supplies” account for a greater percentage of all search queries than in any other state. Your average resident of Wyoming, in other words, is more interested in searching for office supplies than is your average resident of, say, Louisiana — a valuable insight for anyone who sells office supplies online.

Equally valuable is the insight that searches for “where to buy office supplies in bulk” are on the rise — potentially indicative of an emerging pain point.

2. SurveyMonkey

As some of you already know, one of the best ways to conduct market research is to ask your customers a handful of open-ended questions. You can do this for free with SurveyMonkey .

Specifically, with a free SurveyMonkey account, you can ask up to 10 questions and field up to 40 responses with each of your surveys.

Open-ended questions you may ask your customers include (but are not limited to):

• Why did you buy our product?
• What has our product helped you accomplish?
• How does our product compare to others that you’ve used in the past?

With just three questions — well under the limit of a free survey — you can learn quite a bit about your target market. If, for example, the majority of respondents say they bought your product because they were struggling to do their jobs in a cost-effective manner, that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ pain points and your competitors’ weaknesses .

3. Make My Persona

As you collect and analyze customer-related information, it’s a good idea to create or tweak your buyer personas : detailed profiles of the semi-fictional people for whom your product or service is designed. In the context of market research, personas are useful because they help you synthesize and comprehend the information you’re gathering.

Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, you can use a wonderful free tool called Make My Persona .

Intuitive and fun, Make My Persona is a seven-step process that walks you through the essential components of your target customer: demographic information, firmographic information, job title, pain points, and so on. And if you want to go beyond the bare essentials, you can add as many extra sections of information as you like.

Important note: Your personas should be dynamic. As you conduct further market research and learn more about your target customers, your personas should evolve accordingly.

4. WordSift

Make My Persona is appealing, in part, because it enables you to make sense of raw data — to separate the signal from the noise. The same can be said about WordSift , the final free tool we’ll be discussing today.

Built to help teachers with the instruction of vocabulary and reading comprehension, WordSift allows you to generate word clouds: images that represent the frequency with which certain words are used in a given body of text. Look what happens when I copy the introduction to this blog post and paste it into WordSift:

Instantaneously — and unsurprisingly — I can conclude that “business,” “market,” and “research” are among the most frequently used words in the introduction to this post.

What does this have to do with market research? Well, let’s say you’ve been using SurveyMonkey to ask your customers about their reasons for buying your product. One by one, if you were to copy their responses and paste them into WordSift, you’d be able to see which words your customers use most often. That’s a market research gold mine!

Top 4 Free Market Research Resources

Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:

• Helps with the collection of customer-related information

The scope of “customer-related information" remains the same  —  encompassing everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

5. Bureau of Labor Statistics

A government organization that “measures labor market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy to support public and private decision-making,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a wealth of information.

Because this is a blog post about market research — not an economics class — we’ll focus on BLS’ industry- and region-specific information. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Data Tools drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink to something titled “Industry at a Glance.” Click on that, find your industry of interest, and explore the dozens of statistics that BLS has aggregated.

If, for example, you’re interested in the apparel manufacturing industry — either because you’re in the industry or you sell into it — you can see how earnings, prices, and productivity figures are changing over time.

Head back to the homepage, hover over the Subjects drop-down menu, and you’ll see a section labeled Geographic Information:

Select your region of interest, filter by state or metropolitan area (if necessary), and take a tour of BLS’ enormous library of area-specific data.

6. U.S. Census Bureau

On a mission to “serve as the [United States’] leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” the U.S. Census Bureau is another terrific resource that costs nothing to use.

Just as we did with the BLS, we’ll focus on industry- and region-specific information. Admittedly, using the Census website to find industry-specific information is slightly more complicated than it is when using the BLS website. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Explore Data drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink titled “Explore Data Main.”

Click on that, and you’ll be brought to the Census’ search engine. Then, click inside the search bar and select “Advanced Search.”

Underneath “Find A Filter,” type in the name of the industry you’re interested in researching. Once the search suggestions load, simply check the appropriate box and click “Search.”

From there, you’ll be able to explore thousands of data tables, maps, and whitepapers — many of them chock-full of industry-specific information that you can use to your advantage.

Finding region-specific information is a bit more straightforward. Head back to the Advanced Search engine, select “Geography” from underneath Browse Filters, and go from there:

7. Pew Research Center

A nonprofit dedicated to “inform[ing] the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” the Pew Research Center is one of the most authoritative sources of information for anyone striving to make better business decisions.

Whereas the BLS and the Census are (among other things) aggregators of economic data, the Pew Research Center is a “fact tank” — an organization focused on public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other forms of social science inquiry. 

So, although you can’t necessarily use Pew to uncover hyper-specific insights related to your industry or region, you can use it to learn more about your target audience. The best way to do this is through the Topics section of the Pew website.

Clicking that hyperlink brings you to an index of dozens of topics, ranging from Online Video to Homeownership to Democracy. Selecting any of these topics will bring you to a list of relevant content — reports, fact tanks, transcripts, and other forms of media that can date back as far as the early 1980s.

As an example, let’s say you’re developing a product or service that targets new homeowners. If you were to click on the Homeownership topic, you’d land on a list of reports like this one:

If I were you, that’s not a report I’d want to overlook!

We’ll wrap up today’s guide with a free resource specifically for those of you in the software world. Designed to help buyers determine which products are best suited to their needs, G2 is the leading source of validated, unbiased software reviews.

G2 is, in other words, an excellent way to find out what your target customers are saying about your competitors’ products. Do a quick search for the type of software you’re developing and you’re in business.

If you were developing a sales compensation software product and you searched this keyword, you’d be brought to the page you see below. To learn more about Spiff — one of your top-rated industry competitors — all you’d need to do is click “Read Spiff Reviews.”

If you want to get granular, you can filter reviews in a number of different ways. As an example, let’s say you’re developing a sales compensation software product specifically for small businesses. G2 has the filter you’re looking for:

And just like that, you’ve got access to dozens of valuable insights like this one:

Start using market research tools today!

If you try to bring a product or service to market without an understanding of your target customers, your chances of success are slim. According to the most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report , 84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years. With the range of choices at your prospects’ fingertips growing by the day, the need for a thorough market research strategy only intensifies.

We hope you find these free market research tools and resources useful. And if you decide to make the leap to a paid solution, make sure to request a demo of Crayon — the competitive intelligence platform that enables you to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside your businesses’ four walls.

Seeing is believing! Check out Crayon for yourself.

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12 Best Market Research Tools for Startups

• Market Research Tools

Last Updated: May 10, 2024 By Michaela Dale

As a startup founder, conducting thorough market research is essential to understanding your target audience, identifying opportunities, and making informed decisions. However, with so many market research tools available, it can be challenging to know where to start. 

That's why we've put together this comprehensive guide to the best market research tools for startups . Whether you're looking for competitor insights, consumer feedback, or industry data, these tools will help you gather the information you need to succeed.

Recommended: For a powerful, all-in-one market research tool, we recommend Semrush . 

Top Market Research Platforms for Startups

From all-in-one platforms to specialized solutions, these market research tools offer a range of features and benefits to help you gain a competitive edge. We'll explore each tool in detail, discussing their key features, pros and cons, and pricing so you can make an informed decision about which ones are right for your startup.

Best Market Research Tool

Semrush is a powerful tool for startups with features for market research, content management, and more. 

Try it Today

Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that provides valuable insights for market research. With Semrush, you can analyze your competitors' online presence, track keyword rankings, and discover new opportunities for growth.

In addition to the platform’s robust market research capabilities, Semrush also boasts features for search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, advertising, and social media management. 

• Comprehensive competitor analysis
• Keyword research and tracking
• Site audit and backlink analysis
• Steeper learning curve for beginners

Notable Features

• Position tracking to monitor keyword rankings over time
• Organic research to uncover competitors' top pages and keywords
• Advertising research to see competitors’ ad strategies
• Brand monitoring to track online mentions

Semrush offers three main plans: Pro ($129.95 per month), Guru ($249.95 per month), and Business ($499.95 per month). While pricier than some tools, the depth of features makes it worth the investment for serious market research.

2. Think With Google

Think With Google is a free resource provided by Google that offers consumer insights, marketing trends, and industry research. It's a great starting point for startups looking to understand their target market and stay on top of the latest marketing strategies.

• Free to use
• Insights from Google's vast dataset
• Covers a wide range of industries
• Some data may be too broad for niche startups
• Audience insights for understanding consumer behavior
• Marketing trends and best practices
• Case studies and success stories
• Interactive data explorers and visualizations

Think With Google is completely free to use, making it an excellent resource for budget-conscious startups.

3. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a popular online survey tool that allows you to gather insights directly from your target audience. With SurveyMonkey, you can create custom surveys, reach respondents around the world, and analyze results in real time.

• Easy-to-use survey builder
• Large audience reach with SurveyMonkey Audience
• Integrates with other tools like Salesforce and HubSpot
• Limited question types on basic plans
• Question bank with prewritten survey questions
• Skip logic and question randomization
• Data exports to Excel, PDF, and more
• Text analysis for open-ended responses

SurveyMonkey offers four plans: Forms ($25 per user per month), Advantage ($39 per user per month), Premier ($75 per user per month), and Enterprise (custom pricing). The service also offers a 36% multi user discount. 

4. Statista

Statista is a leading provider of market and consumer data, offering access to more than 1 million statistics and insights. Statistica users can find reliable data on industries, markets, and consumer behavior to make data-backed decisions for their business. The platform boasts extensive data sets from more than 190 countries as well as more than 2.5 million interviews through its consumer insights tool. 

• Extensive database covering 190+ countries
• Data from trusted sources like government agencies and market research firms
• Easy-to-use interface and data visualization tools
• Some data may be too high-level for specific niches
• Industry reports and dossiers
• Customizable data exports and downloads
• Infographics and charts for presentations
• Forecasts and trend analyses

Statista offers a Basic account for free, which includes limited access to data and features. Paid plans start at $199 per month for the Starter account and start at $959 per month for the Professional account.

5. Typeform

Typeform is a user-friendly survey and form builder that allows you to create engaging, conversational surveys. With its sleek design and interactive features, Typeform can help you gather insights on everything from signups to feedback while providing a great user experience for your respondents.

• Intuitive, user-friendly interface
• Customizable design and branding options
• Integrates with popular tools like Google Sheets and Mailchimp
• One user only for the Basic plan 
• Logic jumps and question branching
• Hidden fields for personalization and tracking
• Custom thank-you screens and follow-up emails
• Built-in photo and video questions

Typeform offers four plans: Basic ($25 per month), Plus ($50 per month), Business ($83 per month), and Enterprise (custom pricing), which reflect discounts for annual billing.

Glimpse is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered market research platform that helps businesses uncover actionable insights from customer feedback and online conversations. By analyzing data from sources like reviews, social media, and forums, Glimpse can help you understand customer sentiment, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.

• Automated data collection and analysis
• Insights from a wide range of online sources
• Customizable dashboards and reports
• Higher cost than some competitors
• Sentiment analysis to understand customer emotions
• Topic modeling to identify key themes and trends
• Competitor benchmarking and analysis
• Integration with tools like Slack and Zapier

Glimpse offers a pay-as-you-go plan, a Professional plan ($500 per month), an Advanced ($1,000 per month), and an Enterprise plan (custom pricing) with a $50 credit sign-up bonus included. It also offers discounts for annual billing.

7. US Census Bureau

The US Census Bureau is a government agency that provides a wealth of demographic and economic data. While not specifically designed for market research, the data available through the US Census Bureau can be incredibly valuable for startups looking to understand their target market and industry.

• Free, reliable data from a trusted source
• Wide range of demographic and economic variables
• Geographic data down to the local level
• Data may be too broad for some market research needs
• American Community Survey for detailed population and housing data
• Economic Census for comprehensive business data
• Census Business Builder for easy access to key data points
• Interactive data tools and visualizations

All data from the US Census Bureau is free and publicly available.

8. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a keyword research tool that helps you understand what people are searching for online. By generating visualizations of related questions and phrases submitted through search engines like Google, AnswerThePublic can help you identify content opportunities and gain insights into your target audience's needs and interests.

• Online course and ebook included in all plans 
• Unique data visualization format
• Covers a wide range of topics and industries
• Limited to keyword-based insights 
• Question and preposition wheels for related queries
• Alphabetical and popularity-based lists of keywords
• Data export options for further analysis
• Comparison reports for tracking changes over time

AnswerThePublic offers three plans: Individual ($9 per month), Pro ($99 per month), and Expert ($199 per month). The platform also offers a 90% off lifetime option that charges a one-time fee for lifetime access to the platform.

9. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that helps businesses track their online presence and reputation. By monitoring mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry keywords across social media, news sites, and blogs, BrandMentions can help you stay on top of trends and gain valuable insights.

• Comprehensive coverage of online sources
• Real-time alerts and notifications
• Sentiment analysis and influencer identification
• Some data sources may require additional setup
• Historical data analysis and trend tracking
• Insights on customers’ core interests
• Social media tracker tools for your business and competitors

BrandMentions offers three plans: Growing Business ($79 per month), Company ($249 per month), and Enterprise/Agency ($399 per month).

PickFu is a consumer research platform that allows you to get fast, reliable feedback on product ideas, designs, and marketing copy. By presenting your concepts to a targeted audience and asking them to choose between options, PickFu can help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your offerings.

• Quick, easy way to get consumer feedback through polls
• Targeted audiences based on demographics and interests
• Helpful for testing product ideas and designs
• Free plan still requires users to pay per poll response
• Customizable polls with images, text, and videos
• Real-time results and analytics
• Demographic filters and insights
• Shareable reports and embeddable widgets

PickFu offers three plans: Free Forever ($0 per month + $1 per poll response), Professional ($79 per month + $0.95 per poll response), and Team ($299 per month + $0.90 per poll response). 

Attest is a consumer insights platform that helps businesses gather real-time feedback from their target audience. With Attest, you can create surveys, run experiments, and track brand performance to make informed decisions and drive growth. The platform offers an all-in-one customer research tool, providing features for gathering, analyzing, and leveraging data to grow your business. 

• Access to a large, diverse consumer panel
• Intuitive survey builder and targeting options
• Automated analysis and reporting
• No pricing information included on the website 
• Brand tracking and benchmarking
• Expert-written survey templates with preset audiences
• Audience profiling and segmentation
• Integration with popular tools like Slack and Zapier 

Attest doesn’t disclose pricing information on its website so you must reach out to the company directly to obtain a quote. 

12. quantilope

quantilope is an end-to-end customer insight automation platform powered by AI that helps businesses conduct market research and gather consumer insights at scale. With quantilope, you can create complex surveys, analyze results, and generate reports — all within a single, user-friendly platform. Plus, with its powerful tech-driven features, the entire consumer research experience is complete in just one to five days. 

• Intuitive, drag-and-drop survey builder
• Automated data analysis and reporting
• Supports advanced research methods like conjoint analysis 
• Higher learning curve compared to simpler survey tools
• Customizable dashboard and data visualizations
• Multilingual surveys and translations
• Quota management and sample balancing
• Integration with popular tools like Salesforce and Tableau

quantilope offers custom pricing based on your specific research needs and volume. Contact its sales team for a personalized quote and demo.

Which market research tool is best for a tight budget?

For startups on a tight budget, Think With Google, the US Census Bureau, and AnswerthePublic offer valuable insights at no cost. SurveyMonkey and Typeform also have free plans that can be useful for basic surveys and customer feedback.

How do I choose the right market research tool for my startup?

When choosing a market research tool, consider your specific needs and goals. Think about the type of data you need (e.g., competitor insights, consumer feedback, industry trends), the size and scope of your research, and your available budget and resources. It can also be helpful to take advantage of free trials or demos to get a feel for each tool before committing.

Can I use multiple market research tools together?

Yes, using multiple market research tools can give you a more comprehensive understanding of your market and customers. For example, you might use Semrush for competitor analysis, SurveyMonkey for customer feedback, and Statista for industry data. Just be sure to have a clear plan for how you'll integrate and analyze data from different sources.

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• → Market research: What it is, how to u...

Market research: What it is, how to use it, + examples

Market research allows you to categorize your target audience to better understand your consumers. Learn more about how to do market research here.

Latest posts on Tips

Typeform    |    05.2024

Typeform    |    04.2024

So, you’ve got the next billion-dollar idea that’ll blow the top off your profit margins. You just know you’re onto a winner! Time to throw a huge budget (or your life savings) at this idea, right? 

Not so fast! You're not likely to get very far in the marketplace if you only rely on your gut instincts.

How can you know if your idea even has a chance of surviving in the cutthroat marketplace? 

The answer: market research. A realistic prediction, based on data , of your chances of success. Basically, it’s a way to find out the market viability of your idea.

If you’re new to market research, don’t be intimidated. This guide will take you from basic concepts through to advanced techniques. Plus, our in-house experts will walk you through real-life examples of how we do it here at Typeform.

What is market research and why does it matter?

Market research is the process of collecting information about your target market and customers so you can:

Learn who your customers are

Find out what they want and/or need

Gauge potential market size

Discover trends in your industry

Get wise about what your competitors are up to

Determine how you can stand out

This way, you’ll better understand how to serve your customers, prioritize, and get higher returns on your own marketing and product development efforts. Market research is an essential part of any business’s strategy, whatever the size of your company.

There are many ways to approach market research, and at Typeform, we’ve developed our own spin on it, thanks to continuous testing and the insights we get from being a market research tool ourselves ( forms and surveys).

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of business—however, it’s still possible to reduce some of the uncertainty.

This is where market research is your best ally. Nothing is guaranteed, but making an informed decision based on comprehensive research beats a stab in the dark. Market research helps reduce the thickness of that fog to see what your options are and which direction you might want to take.

Convinced you shouldn’t be sleeping on market research? Great—let’s dive deeper.

Types of market research

Finding what works best for you is a must for useful and actionable market research. We don’t believe in a cut-and-paste approach for all businesses and markets, nor in one definitive “right” way to do things. However, there are some basic principles that apply across the board. Here are a few types of market research.

Secondary and primary research 

Secondary market research delves into information that you don’t create yourself. It’s data that’s already out there, which you can buy or access for free, and is great for benchmarking. 

Examples of secondary research:

Industry reports

Census data

Research paper

Articles in journals or newspapers

Primary market research involves collecting information yourself—this may be more expensive and time-consuming than secondary research, but it’s a better investment in the long run. Focus on your own target audience and gather information directly relevant to your goals. 

Examples of primary research:

Interviews (face-to-face or over the phone)

Focus groups

User testing

Quantitative and Qualitative

Ahh, the classic quantitative vs. qualitative dichotomy.

Quantitative market research gathers data that's numerical, descriptive, and structured. You can draw statistics from quantitative research. It involves more of the “what” questions and can be done at scale.

This type of market research is usually carried out through surveys and questionnaires and can be internal or external. Internal quantitative research examines your current customers, while external can help you identify new customers and see the actual distribution of the whole market. External is more likely to be objective, as your own customers already know you and will have formed opinions.

Examples of quantitative questions:

“Where do you live?”

“How much do you spend on electricity per month, on average?”

“Do you use this product?”

“How often do you go to the gym?”

“On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied are you with our service?”

Qualitative market research involves more of the “how” and “why” questions. It’s done at a much smaller scale, is less structured and more exploratory, aiming for insight rather than certainty. It helps you find out how customers feel about your product, their opinions and preferences—in other words, things that can't be quantified.

Examples of qualitative questions:

“Why did you choose product A over product B?”

“How does this image make you feel?”

“What do you feel is missing from this service?

“Describe the last time you purchased something online.”

“What are your favorite brands for dog grooming products?”

Usually, this type of market research is done through surveys with open-ended questions or interviews. A small number of interviews are conducted, which are then projected to apply to a larger population. 

Quantitative and qualitative research don’t need to be seen as opposite or distinct techniques. It can be an “and” instead of an “either-or.”

Market research for product development and marketing efforts

Market research tends to inform two main areas in a business: product development and marketing efforts. Whether it’s creating a new product or a new set of features, at Typeform, we always start from the end. 

Who’s going to use this? 

Who will buy it? 

How do I justify engineers spending time on this? 

Market research is one of the most important tools to answer these questions. Nobody wants to invest time, money, and effort into making something that no one wants or needs. Market research allows you to assess the market size, its opportunities, and your competitors. This is also where user research and market research inform one another.

Segmenting the market is one of the main activities in market research, as it gives you your target audience(s). How else will you know who is buying from you already, who to market to, and which marketing messages work best?

Competitor analysis , another cornerstone of market research, helps you craft your positioning. In simple terms: How you're different from your competitors and why should buyers pick you?

How to conduct market research

So you can probably see by now how varied market research is. The way we do our own market research here at Typeform has evolved over the years through testing and experimentation. After much trial and error, we finally landed on the approach that works best for us.

Set your goals

Before we even think about launching market research of any scale, we make sure to have a clear objective in mind. 

Are you trying to enhance a particular metric (such as customer numbers or customer satisfaction level), gauge potential market size, or something else?

Define your objective(s) first, then move on to the next step.

Define your audience 

Whatever your approach, the next thing you should always have at the front of your mind is your customer.

Still, focusing on the customer can mean different things to different people.

Focus on jobs, not personas

Brace yourself, because we’re about to say something controversial: don’t focus on buyer personas.

This flies in the face of what most other market research guides will tell you: Research your audience to create buyer personas and frame your offering around them.

Not that buyer personas aren't important—they are. And at Typeform, we definitely use them, but we also follow the “Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)” model. This is the backbone for how we conceptualize everything, from our marketing messaging to our product development. It informs how we see our customers and how we segment them.

How many people in your business speak directly to customers? The bigger your organization, the smaller this number is likely to be, and the further removed the customer becomes from the decision-making. The job creates a consistent framework for everyone to work with and remains close to the customer’s needs.

As you identify needs that intersect, you can begin to find unique differentiators for your product. 

At the end of the day, your customers don’t care about you or your product or its features. They care about the job or jobs they are trying to get done, and if you provide the best solution, they'll pay you for it. If you don’t, they'll move on to your competition faster than you can say, “job to be done.”

 So how does this all relate to market research?

Rather than framing your market research efforts on creating buyer personas and targeting them, frame them around jobs your customers are trying to get done. There'll be some natural overlap with personas, but you need not be wed to them.

Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the act of dividing a target market into groups (or segments). This lets you tailor your efforts to each segment, whether that be your marketing strategy or deciding on features for your product.

The four most common methods: 

Demographics: age, gender, ethnicity, income, industry, job

Psychographic: lifestyle, values, personality traits, interests

Geographic: country, region, city, town

Behavioral: spending habits, internet browsing habits

Depending on your situation, any of these might be useful focus points, and all of them no doubt provide valuable insight.

The benefits of segmentation include:

A better experience for customers: A better understanding of your customers can only really be a win-win. You’ll be able to tailor each part of your customer experience, from marketing message to product experience, based on their segment.

More targeted marketing: In other words, this means better use of your marketing resources. Rather than casting the net wide and crossing your fingers that you haven’t just thrown a lot of time and money away, your segments let you focus your efforts where they’re likely to have the most return.

Improved product development: Knowing the real demands of your target audience will allow for product development that they'll actually appreciate (read: pay for).

Developing a market research strategy

Now that you’re convinced of the importance of market research and how it can help your business, you’re probably pumped to get started. Having even a basic plan can be the difference between a piece of research that has a real and lasting impact on your business and gathering some interesting insights that are forgotten in two weeks. 

Always start with the question: Why? What’s the purpose of the research? 

Your objective shouldn’t be “to do some research,” nor should you select a method first, whether that be a JTBD-based questionnaire, customer interviews, etc. 

Make sure you’re always starting with a question you want to answer and adapt the method to the question.

Examples of questions to think about:

“How can we increase conversions?”

“Why are people churning after two months?”

“What is the appetite for this product?”

“Which product features are most useful to our customers?”

“In which region(s) should we focus our next marketing campaign?"

Let this always be front and center as you go about planning and executing your research.

Market research tips 

Do preliminary research: Have a basic understanding of the industry and the landscape you’ll be investigating. It doesn't have to be extremely in-depth, but it’s important to have a foundation. This ensures you ask the right questions, know what to assess, and can get a more accurate vision of the market.

Align with potential stakeholders: There may be others in your organization who could benefit from the data you're about to gather. It may be worthwhile checking around to see how you could maximize your research efforts. Even just one extra question on your survey might provide essential data for someone else.

Use the right tools for your market research purposes: Make sure that whichever tools you use are fit for purpose. As technology develops, market research automation becomes more important. Using the right tools won't only save you lots of time and energy; it's also essential for correct and high-quality data.

Market research questions

The questions you ask depend on your objectives. You should write market research questions that are purposeful and will help strengthen your relationship with your customers.

You should also consider running a test first, depending on the scale of your research. Sending your survey to a smaller population and analyzing the first few responses will let you check that you’re getting useful responses that are answering your research questions.

Sometimes, until we start getting results, we’re unaware that a question is ineffective. This may be because the question uses terminology not understood by the target audience. 

For example, you may ask, “What SaaS tools do you currently use?” If you get responses like “iPhone 11” and “desktop computer,” then you know you need to adapt your questions better to your audience! 

Here at Typeform, we sometimes send out test emails to smaller populations (around 10% of the target audience) for this purpose and adjust our surveys if necessary.

How many responses to collect for market research

400 is the magic number.

Well, no, in fact, there is no magic number, sorry.

Generally speaking, 400 is the standard recommended sample size—this just means the number of people who responded to your market research survey. 

But this number can vary greatly depending on your total population (i.e., all the people that this research will apply to) and the way you segment them. 

But there’s a mathematical explanation for the popularity of 400: With 400 responses, your margin of error is 5%. 

For example, say you got 400 customer responses to your market research survey. 80% of your respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Would you buy from us again?” That means there’s a 95% chance that in your total population of customers, around 80% would buy from you again.

Don’t forget that to reach your target sample size, you'll need to reach out to many more people! If sending out surveys by email, open rates tend to hover around 15-25% . The percentage of people who then go on to complete a survey will be even lower. 

To increase your chances of survey opens and completions, offering an incentive is never a bad idea. Prize draws or discounts on your product have worked well for us. And, of course, the experience of answering a market research survey is paramount for completions—make sure your form is user-friendly with a smooth and beautiful interface. 

Try to aim for a sample that'll be a good approximation of your overall population. There’s a risk of bias , depending on the channel through which your research survey is shared. For example, if you share it on social media, you might get a younger average age of respondents, which may not be accurately representative of your total population of customers.

Sample market research template

Below is a sample market research template for planning a piece of primary market data.

A brief summary of why this research was started:

What led to this research being done/requested? 

What needs to be validated or explored?

What's been done prior to this research? E.g., competitive analysis, brainstorming, previous research

What insights will this research generate? 

How will these insights be used?

Business/product objectives

We can't emphasize enough the importance of having a clear goal in mind. What metric(s) are you trying to enhance? E.g., more conversions, less churn. This helps people understand the bigger picture of this research.

State what decisions are going to be made or impacted based on the research. As a general rule, if you’re not prepared to make changes, don’t run the research.

Research objectives 

State the high-level objectives for this research. Try to keep it specific, actionable, and two to three points max. 

Research questions 

Provide a list of market research questions you plan to answer during this research (these questions are not the interview questions). 

Participant criteria 

List the primary characteristics of the people you'll recruit for the research, like:

Job(s) to be done

Also decide on the minimum and maximum number of participants you'll need for your study.

Taking action on market research insights

Remember, data isn't reality—however, market research can give you a pretty decent view of reality.

Data can also be unpredictable. Missing a small detail can skew ‌results significantly, so try to be as methodical and meticulous as you can.

Put our market research survey template to the test with customizable questions and design. Take your questionnaire to the next level with over 1 million photos, videos, and icons, or upload your own. Build your ultimate market research survey today with the help of Typeform.

Useful tools for market research

Demographic survey questionnaire template

User persona survey template

Competitor research tool for the SaaS industry

Margin of error calculator for sample size

Google Sheets

About the author

We're Typeform - a team on a mission to transform data collection by bringing you refreshingly different forms.

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PESTLE Analysis

Insights and resources on business analysis tools

PEST Analysis: Examples and Meaning in Business

Last Updated: Apr 8, 2024 by Jim Makos Filed Under: PEST Analysis

What is a PEST analysis, and what are its four parts? What is the difference between PESTLE analysis and PEST, and why is it important for every business? As a business student, analyst, manager or owner, you are called to conduct a PEST analysis sooner or later. In the next 10 minutes, I’ll go through everything you need to know about PEST analysis and how you can do a PEST analysis of an organization starting from scratch. I promise you’ll know more about PEST analysis than 99% of people out there, as I’m explaining everything as concisely as possible. Let’s start with the PEST analysis definition.

What is a PEST Analysis?

PEST analysis is a strategic tool for organizations to identify and assess how Political, Economic, Social, and Technological external factors impact operations so that they can gain a competitive edge. A PEST analysis helps you determine how these factors will affect a business’s performance and strategy in the long term. It is often used in collaboration with other analytical business tools. For example:

• A combination of PEST and SWOT analysis usually gives a clearer understanding of a situation with related internal and external factors
• PESTLE analysis is an extension of PEST analysis that covers legal and environmental factors

I’m going to explain the PEST analysis as simply as possible with examples and a template for better understanding. I will also show how to do a PEST analysis starting from scratch, even for people without any business education like me!

Why Do a PEST Analysis

It’s simple: to succeed. For a business to be successful, they need a few things:

• A solid product
• Marketing plan
• Identifiable brand
• Happy customers
• Thorough budget
• An investor or two
• Unique selling position
• And a whole lot of research

Throughout the endless market research, customer acquisition costs, and project risk assessments, business managers could forget about outside influences ( we call these external factors in this type of analysis). Aside from the company’s internal resources and industry factors, PEST’s macroeconomic factors can impact a company’s performance in a big way.

By being aware of external factors, managers can aid their business. But if they don’t know them, they can cripple their business before it begins. That’s how advantageous PEST analysis is .

What are the four parts of PEST analysis?

Now, let me explain each of the four parts of a PEST analysis more thoroughly. You’ll better understand what each of these external factors in this analysis is all about.

• Political – Here, government regulations and legal factors are assessed in terms of their ability to affect the business environment and trade markets. The main issues addressed in this section include political stability, tax guidelines, trade regulations, safety regulations, and employment laws.
• Economic – Next, businesses examine the economic issues that have an impact on the company. This would include factors like inflation, interest rates, economic growth, the unemployment rate and policies, and the business cycle followed in the country.
• Social – At this stage, businesses focus on the society and people. Elements like customer demographics, cultural limitations, lifestyle attitudes, and education come into play here. This part allows a business to understand how consumer needs are shaped.
• Technological – This may come as a surprise, but technology may not always be an ally for businesses. Depending on the product, technology may affect the organization positively but also negatively. In PEST’s last section we find technological advancements, the role of the Internet, and how an industry’s innovation creates winners and losers.

Every business is different. Some factors may not affect a firm or industry as they would with others. But it’s beneficial to have a well-rounded view of the many factors that could affect them. Along with the ones that will affect them.

This is why we do PEST analysis for a business — to be aware of risks, opportunities, influences, and limitations. Let’s go deeper into these external factors that impact the success of a business. I’ll also briefly mention a specific example for each of them.

Political Factors

Political factors in PEST analysis refer to the extent to which the government and political actions in a country influence the business climate. Here are some examples that will occasionally make it into the (P) of my PEST analysis:

• Tax policies
• Tax incentives
• Political tensions
• Employment laws
• Import restrictions
• Health and safety laws
• Consumer protection laws
• Tariff and Trade restrictions
• Regulation and deregulation

For instance, a country’s foreign policy often plays an important role in determining trade regulations. This can either result in trade restrictions or trade incentives and can affect an organization’s operations. Read my dedicated page on political factors with more examples here .

Economic Factors

In the (E) part of PEST Analysis, we run into how the economy affects the organization. I consider the following economic factors when doing a PEST analysis:

• Interest rate
• Inflation rates
• Exchange rates
• Unemployment rate

For instance, exchange rates affect a global organization by influencing the cost of imported and exported goods. Furthermore, interest rates influence the cost of capital available to the organization. Thus they are significant in the expansion and growth of a business. Find more economic factors and examples of how they affect businesses here .

Social Factors

Social factors include different cultural and demographic aspects of society. These can affect the macro-environment in which the organization operates.

In the ‘S’ part of the PEST analysis I usually examine:

• Age distribution
• Cultural diversity
• Demographics shifts
• Population growth rate
• Health consciousness and trends
• Changing consumer lifestyles and preferences

A study of these factors can help organizations understand the dynamics of existing and emerging potential markets along with future customer needs.

Social factors are more unpredictable than economic and political factors, simply because people are unpredictable. But every business needs customers. And what and how they buy has an immediate effect on an organization’s profitability.

Based on these social factors, marketers create buyer personas. These avatars are necessary for businesses to target the ideal customer.

For example, if you’re selling whey powder, you go after fitness enthusiasts and bodybuilders. You are looking for people that follow an active lifestyle. Hence, a declining trend in health consciousness doesn’t seem encouraging.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. Learn more about social factors here .

Technological Factors

Technological factors aren’t important only for tech-related businesses. The (T) part in PEST analysis may affect even the most old-school organization that’s been operating for a century.

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace and consumers are becoming extremely tech-savvy. With the advent of new technology, older technology gets outdated and obsolete. If an organization does not look out for technological changes, it can lag behind its competitors.

I often include the following technological factors when conducting a PEST analysis:

• Cybersecurity Threats
• Emerging Technologies
• Big data and computing
• AI and Machine Learning
• Supply Chain Automation

Let’s consider the advancements in computing; more specifically, networking.

If a business offers the latest and fastest Wi-Fi in their store, it’s an added luxury. It’s annoying if it still operates on 3G speeds, but won’t ruin sales. However, if they handle all receipts in an online database and that goes offline because they didn’t keep their network infrastucture up-to-date then they have a major problem. Especially in big holidays like Black Friday.

Again, this is about impact on the business operation. How will ‘X’ technology affect the business in the long and short term? That’s what we’re trying to figure out with PEST analysis.

A ton more technological factors can be found here .

PEST Analysis Examples

Here is a hypothetical PEST analysis example that can give you a clear understanding of how this works:

Here at PESTLEanalysis.com I rarely limit myself to PEST analysis. I almost always go the extra mile and include the Legal and Environmental factors when I initiate a PEST analysis. This leads to a more detailed analysis called PESTLE.

PESTLE Analysis: An extension of PEST Analysis

PESTLE analysis is an extension of PEST that is used to assess two additional macroeconomic factors. These factors are the  Legal and Environmental conditions that can have an impact on a organization. Examples of PESTLE analysis are similar to those of a PEST analysis, but they will include factors such as these:

• Discrimination laws
• Copyright and patent laws

Environment:

• Waste management
• Changes in weather and climate
• Laws regarding pollution and recycling
• Use of green or eco-friendly products and practices

So, if you want to assess a business situation comprehensively, a PESTLE analysis is a definite must. You can find more about that analysis here .

Why PEST Analysis Is Important For Every Business

So, now that we did a PEST analysis, how’s that going to help the business?

What does a five-year business plan look like? Or a ten-year plan? It likely involves growth.

Whether it’s the expansion of a product line or opening stores in new locations, business changes need proper preparation. And that’s where the PEST analysis comes in.

PEST analysis is the foolproof plan for business expansion !

Both new business owners and veterans should include PEST analysis in their business plan. By breaking down the critical influences in the P.E.S.T. categories, businesses get a better understanding of whether their next business move is strategic or doesn’t make sense.

For example, politics isn’t just about political tensions, unrest and elections. Politics are also about trade policies, regulations and taxation. Companies doing business worldwide have to consider laws in the countries they operate, as well. Even if they aren’t doing international trade yet, it could be a possibility in the future, and going in blind is a good way to toss success out the window.

PEST analysis helps people become aware.

Aware of how political parties and regulations can impact a business. And how the economy (past, present, and future) affects an industry. It allows people to understand consumers — who they are, what they buy, and why they don’t buy. And finally, it identifies what technology is necessary for the development and success of a product, business, or industry.

It’s almost like an outline. It shows people what influences impact the quality, success, or devastation of businesses and industries. You can’t stop the four influences, but if you’re aware of them and their impact, you can plan around, against, or with them.

PEST analysis is often used by business analysts, marketers, students, and business owners, since it’s super important for every business!

All you need to do a proper PEST analysis is time. And the payoff is worth every second.

How PEST analysis works

PEST analysis requires research and data, sometimes ten years old, sometimes only a couple. The more information I have to go through, the more accurate my final results will be. By looking into the past and the present, I can make predictions for the future.

By studying these recent developments through a PEST analysis lens, organizations are deciding whether to jump into this for the long haul or for the time being.

You want to look at your industry in a similar light. Ten years ago, did it exist? Has it slowed down within the last two years or are more companies diving in? More competition can be a strong sign an industry is booming, but it could also be the first sign of oversaturation.

Break down your assessment into the four categories of PEST analysis. Start with politics and work your way through the remaining factors. Or start from the bottom. Whatever gets the job done and makes the analysis enjoyable.

How to Do a PEST Analysis From Scratch

I’ve written dozens of PEST analyses over the last couple of years. Below I document my process on how to do a PEST analysis , even when you’ve never written one before.

You should have a topic in mind. Most PEST analyses are about a specific business, industry, or product. However, they can also be applied to countries, too. You can’t start without a topic, though, so have it ready.

Where to find information for your PEST analysis

It’ll be easier to find and segment information if you break your analysis down into four sections, like the acronym implies:

• Technological

Each section will require its own information. However, some of this information will overlap.

For instance, the economy is often closely tied to political (in)stability. And the state of the economy always affects consumers (social). You don’t need to look for these patterns specifically— it’ll become apparent as you discover new information.

Start with the history

You should be familiar with your topic. If you’re not, read about its history. Learn how it was established, how long it has been around, and who founded it. Read about any major achievements on the organization in question over the last few years. Jot down notes whenever something that seems relevant or important pops up.

After this informational primer, it’s time to start on the four sections. I do my PEST analysis in order of the acronym because the information often bleeds into the next section.

Finding Political Information

Political information is easier to find than in other sections of the analysis (social and technological, specifically). Here, you’ll want to investigate the current political climate.

For instance, if the organization originates from America, you’ll research the current political parties. Who is in charge? Has this affected business operations in any way?

If your topic (business, product, industry) was established years ago, what was the political climate like then? Are different parties in power now? If this is the case, then you’ll want to compare how things have changed for your topic from then to now.

This is also the section where you’ll look into laws and regulations affecting business. Remember the list we went through in the beginning.

I find this information with a simple Google search. Such as “tariff laws USA” (plug in the country you’re searching for if it’s not the United States).

It’s best to get this information from a government site. These sites end in .gov. You may also find information from organizations (websites ending in .org) but not all of these sites are legitimate organizations. Be wary while you research.

Honestly, most of the information you’ll find is dense. But it’s easier if you have a goal. Look for signs of:

• Government (in)stability
• Possible political corruption
• New bills/regulations that may impact your topic
• Any issues your topic has had with current/former regulations or political parties

If your topic is a company, finding the right information may be easier. Search for “company name + political issues” or “company name + policies” and see what comes up. Avoid any information from untrustworthy sites and sites with no legitimate source.

Finding Economic Information

While you’re researching political information, you may come across connections to the current economy. For instance, political instability often leads to economic instability. This causes unemployment rates to rise and employee strikes. This affects how much disposable income people have.

You may have already found information in your political section that confirms economic problems. But if you haven’t, search government sites for current tax rates, interest rates (if your topic involves international business), and the current state of the economy. Is it good? Thriving? Or bad and declining?

Again, use government websites. Search for economic statistics over the last few years. If your topic is an industry, see how many companies (startups) have started within the last few years.

If your topic is a business that has international stores, look into the relationship between the country of origin and each country the company does business. If the relationship is good, it’s often a good outlook for the company. But if it’s bad, it may lead to problems. What problems? Do a bit of digging online.

Also, if your PEST analysis is for a company, you may look into stocks . Have they been declining? On the rise? Because if it’s the former, then the business may not be looking good. And you’ll want to find out why .

If my topic is a business, I sometimes check out the competition. I’ll look into how that other company has been fairing economically, specifically how its sales have risen or fallen over the last couple of years. If it’s dropped products, shifted marketing efforts, etc., I want to know why . A competitor analysis isn’t always necessary , but it can shed light on possible problems your topic may face.

Finding Social Information

This section is a bit trickier. Political and economic sectors rely heavily on data and evidence. You can find this information on government websites. News sites too, even. And although you can find databases about demographics and population growth for this section — all applicable in a PEST analysis — I wouldn’t stop there.

In the social section, I often examine how consumers are impacted by political and economic factors. You can draw conclusions based on the information you’ve already gathered from your political and economic segments.

For instance, if there is political instability and the economy is on the fritz, then consumers may feel uneasy. They may have fewer job options. And that means they’re less likely to spend frivolously. If your topic is a luxury product, it may mean the company that makes it may have lower sales this year.

But you also want to learn about how consumers feel about your topic. If it’s a company, do consumers generally like it? Or is public opinion souring? There should be a reason for why.

Consider Facebook. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has consistently been in hot water over the years. If not for data breaches affecting millions of users, but for their shady involvement with fake news and political tampering.

This has led many consumers to shy away from using Facebook. And this affects businesses that use Facebook to reach new customers.

In this section of the PEST analysis, I’m more likely to search for my topic on news sites and publications. The more popular the topic, the easier it’ll be to find articles written about it. But if the topic has ever been in the news, you’ll likely find it online.

Websites to search include :

• Consumer Reports
• Local news websites
• Other reputable sources

If you know your topic has been in the news for something bad, you can search the topic + the problem.

Although the information may overlap, take keynotes here. See how the problem is affecting consumer opinion. You may even want to take a look at the comments (if there are any) and see what people are saying. It’s coming straight from the lion’s mouth (consumers).

I think many PEST analyses favor numbers too much. We live in a world where anyone with an opinion can be heard, thanks to the internet. And enough of those voices can cause a business to change its policies and products. It can even cause the company to collapse.

So it’s important to search for how consumers feel about your topic too.

Finding Technological Information

This section of the PEST analysis is a bit abstract as well. You’re looking into how new technological advancements has affected your topic positively or negatively. You should also look into what technology your topic uses (currently). And what technology they may want to incorporate.

You may want to look at competitors if your topic is a product or business. See what others are using. And think about why they are.

Press releases

It may be beneficial to search for press releases involving your topic, if possible. If your company is using new technology, they may have announced it through a press release. You can search “company name + press release” or search through these press release websites:

• PR NewsWire
• NPR: National Public Radio

You may also find other information here for the other sections of the PEST analysis. Which is just an overall bonus. If all else fails, check if your topic has a website (unless it’s an industry or country). Discuss how they use social media (if they don’t, then… discuss that too!). In this section, you’re assessing what your topic uses, what it doesn’t, and why.

Putting it all together in a final PEST analysis

You’ll likely have heaps of information at hand. For some it’ll feel like too much — but that’s never the case for a PEST analysis. As you begin to read through each section’s notes, incorporate the most interesting, pressing, or surprising information. If anything overlaps with other sections, include that too.

I write each section of a PEST analysis at a time. I take my notes and create coherent sentences. Sometimes I make a list of the most important points and include them that way. If the section is long, I’ll use subheadings to break up the information.

Work on each section separately. And then if there are overlapping themes, incorporate those in. You may want to use those at the end of each section to connect to the next.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve completed your PEST analysis! Most of the work is in finding the information and making it coherent. The last 10-20 percent is putting it all together. So, once the research phase is done, you’re basically done too!

Understanding PEST Analysis: Taking Action

In conclusion, developing an understanding of what is PEST analysis becomes even more important when a company is about to launch a new business or a new product. In general, when they are about to change something drastically. That’s when all these factors play an important role in determining the feasibility and profitability of the new venture.

Therefore, developing an understanding of PEST analysis is useful for organizations for analyzing and understanding the ground realities of the environment they have to operate in.

Realizing what is PEST and knowing how to take this analysis into consideration, the organization can be in a better position to analyze the challenges, environment, factors, opportunities, restrictions and incentives it faces. In case an organization fails to take into account any one of these factors, it may fail to plan and operate properly.

But don’t PEST analysis stop you. Here are some variations that may come in handy when assessing how the external environment affects an organization:

• STEEP Analysis
• STEEPLED Analysis
• SWOT Analysis

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