8 Best Market Research Tools for 2023

In today’s world, entering a new market or releasing a new product without conducting adequate market research is like stepping into uncharted territory.

You might not be able to navigate your way properly.

With market research, you can get more information about your target audience and tailor your product and marketing strategy to suit their needs.

As this is an intensive activity, sticking to traditional methods can be a hassle.

Thankfully, there are many market research tools to make things easier for you.

A market research tool is all you need to gain valuable insight into your audience’s interests, demographics, and even your competitors’ movements.

As there are several online tools you can leverage, it can be very confusing to settle for one.

To make things easier for you, we’ve done our homework and come up with the eight best market research tools.

Each of them has what it takes to help you maneuver the marketplace.

Why Do You Need Market Research Tools?

These are compelling reasons why you need market research tools for your business:

Improved Communication with Customers

Market data and customer feedback allow you to understand your customers better—what they like and dislike.

This way, you can develop better marketing strategies that will adequately position your business and products.

Data-Driven Decisions

Market research eliminates guessing games in your business.

The data you’ve gathered gives you enough information to deduce detailed and accurate insights.

This will help you to adopt effective strategies that will scale your business.

In fact, after implementing the new campaigns, you can use the tools to track and measure your progress.

Gather Accurate Target Personas

Every marketer knows how important it is to understand their target audience, as it plays a huge role in the organization’s success.

It’s even better if you have more details than regular customer data.

This is where market research comes in.

With market research tools, you can get detailed information about your audience based on their online activities, habits, behaviors, and preferences.

Recognize Growth Opportunities

Many business owners use market research when entering a new market or launching new products.

However, you can also use this system to identify new opportunities you probably haven’t thought about before.

That might include finding new customers, channels, markets, or innovative ways to hedge in the marketplace.

Also, while carrying out competitive analyses, you might discover new partnerships that you can tap into.

Discover Ideal Marketing Channels

There are different marketing channels you can leverage to scale your business: paid ads, social media, referrals, affiliates, and more.

Still, not all these channels are ideal for your business.

Instead of guessing and settling for a channel that won’t produce the best results, you can conduct market research to find out which channels are more suitable for your business and will bring in more rewards.

Increased Competitive Advantage

Another reason you need market research is to know what your competitors are doing and how well their strategies are working for them.

Doing this will spur you to develop even better campaigns, identify new opportunities, and so on.

All of these will help to boost your competitive advantage.

8 Top Market Research Tools

1. Google Trends – Top Keyword Research Tool

Google created Google Trends to make your content more acceptable to search engines.

SEOs and marketers can leverage this keyword research tool to discover what their target audiences are searching for worldwide and use it in their marketing campaigns.

It also allows you to access data in an aggregated and categorized way.

What makes this tool different from other keyword research tools is that it provides search volume results which compare the performance of a search term with others.

Besides getting insights into common search topics, Google Trends also allows you to segment these results based on time, search network type, and region. That way, you can pick out keywords that trend at a particular season.

2. Think with Google – Top Pick for Valuable Insights

Think with Google lets you get valuable insights from the world’s most powerful search engine.

Nothing beats using Google’s free resource library of figures and facts in the form of case studies, articles, interviews, videos, and the like, to optimize your marketing strategy.

It’s a collection of online market research tools that provide information on consumer insights, marketing trends, and technological developments that can affect your marketing strategy or business plan.

Furthermore, if you want more insight into your target audience, you can leverage the site’s “Find My Audience” tool.

This tool supplies more information about customers that Google believes are interested in your services or products. It can also guide you on what to talk about on your business’s YouTube channel.

There’s also the “Market Finder” tool for researching international markets.

3. U.S. Census Bureau – Largest Demographic Data Resource

As the name implies, the U.S. Census Bureau grants you free access to U.S. census data. Reportedly, they carry out more than 130 surveys each year, so you can see how much of reliable a data source it is.

You can streamline your search using variables such as age, location, year, and income.

This free market research tool also offers a visual representation of certain data sets, identifying potential target markets around the United States.

To make the most out of the Census Bureau, you should use the NAICS code of your business. You can also use the platform’s Tables tool by selecting “Filter” on the sidebar and looking up your industry.

Then, it will generate a report that will answer some questions you have about your kind of business, including where the market has been inundated.

However, you should note that you can only access U.S. data via this site, so this might not be the ideal market research tool if you need data for other regions.

4. Pew Research Center – Best for Statistical Analysis

Pew Research Center is one of the best free market research tools that offer enough statistical and demographic information to rival any paid tool.

On its website, there are survey reports on various details about your target audience, including the social media platforms they use and how they use them, their national and political views, their lifestyles, and much more.

Here, you’ll be getting more insights into anything related to political attitudes, economic conditions, and social media usage.

Also, you can filter data based on demographics like age or gender and use that to determine your communication strategies.

The bottom line is that while Pew doesn’t offer many insights about specific regions or industries, you can use it to learn more about your audience.

5. SurveyMonkey – Best for Market Research Surveys

SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular market research tools you can find. It allows you to use surveys to better connect with your target audience and understand their needs better.

This platform lets you create customized surveys using different question formats: sliding scale, multiple choice, and open-ended, among others.

After creating these surveys, you can send them out via social media, links, and emails or embed them into a web page. You can then sort through personal responses or use the tool’s custom charts and reports to visualize data.

What sets this site apart from many market research tools is that while most use data sources to get a general overview of your target market, SurveyMonkey offers original insights from actual consumers of your products and services.

It also offers other top features via its market research solutions and services, which come together to conduct market research without stress.

6. Tableau – Best for Data Visualization

Tableau’s selling point is its data visualization feature that helps businesses and organizations view data comprehensibly.

With this market research tool, you can analyze data in charts, graphs, or tables, notice trends in your data, and share this data with other people in your organization.

Tableau also lets you collate and collect data from several sources like Google Analytics, Excel sheets, and relational databases.

You can then combine all these data to make collaborative datasets that will help you paint a clearer picture of your target market.

In addition, you can use this tool to classify and analyze data using many criteria, such as demographics and geography.

To make things easier for you, this platform utilizes an easy drag-and-drop interface to help you create visualizations and reports without any coding knowledge.

7. Statista – Top Statistical Data Analysis Tool

As an online market research tool, Statista has established itself as a hub of market research reports, statistics, and visual data.

This tool gathers data from different reliable sources across the web and transforms them into charts and graphs that are easy to analyze by marketers, product creators, and researchers.

On top of that, data is regularly updated on the site, so every year, you can see how trends have changed on the same chart.

The site features data on every topic you can think of, making it the best tool for understanding any business’s market trends and consumer behavior.

You can also access market research data for content marketing, creating buyer personas, and building online questionnaires.

Finally, with a clean interface, many reporting tools, infographics, and global surveys, Statista is that one market research tool you’ll want in your arsenal.

8. BrandMentions – Top Social Media Monitoring Platform

BrandMentions is a research tool that focuses on social media and what your prospective customers say on those platforms.

To get audience insights on a particular topic, enter a keyword, and the site will display recent social posts with those keywords and the context they were used in.

Furthermore, subscribing to the tool means obtaining sentiment analysis on every keyword you enter.

Other metrics you’ll get include Performance (the number of people who engage with the keyword every day), Mentions by Weekday (keyword mentions), and Reach (the number of people who view the keyword each day).

In addition, you can use BrandMentions to gain insights on the perfect time to announce the launch of your new products.

It doesn’t end there; with this tool, you can discover how well people are responding to the product you’re launching. This will help you to improve your marketing campaign.

Frequently Asked Questions

To Wrap Up

There are several things you can achieve with a market research tool to scale your business.

You don’t have to be at a loss on what to do anymore in your business—any of the tools we’ve listed will help you make informed decisions.