Last Updated on March 7, 2024 by Alex Birkett
Understanding the problems your customers have and what they expect requires you to make time for and invest in market research.
However, market research comes with its challenges.
For example, finding honest respondents who are willing to take part in your surveys and interviews is hard. As if that’s not enough, you need to choose tools that will help you collect and analyze the data you collect and get buy-in from other departments to implement your findings.
So even if you want to gather more customer insights or even identify opportunities in the market, these challenges force you to gradually push market research into the backburner.
The result? A mismatch in what you offer and what customers expect:
While you can’t wish away the challenges that come with market research, using market research tools goes a long way in solving these challenges. These tools help you collect accurate feedback from customers and save time when analyzing the data you collect.
And in this post, I’ve compiled a list of 12 market research tools to help make market research easier for you as you gather useful insights from your customers.
But first, let’s do some housekeeping to make sure we’re on the same page.
What is a Market Research Tool?
A market research tool is a software application that allows you to study market trends, study your competitors, collect customer insights, and feedback about your product or service.
The data you collect using market research tools helps to inform your marketing strategy, improve the product you’re selling, and understand how your customers think and feel about your brand.
Market research tools come with different capabilities. Some help you interact with customers by asking them questions and listen to what they are saying about your brand online.
Other market research tools allow you to study how customers behave online and spy on your competitors to know what they’re up to.
So in addition to helping you collect accurate feedback from customers and save time when analyzing the data you collect, market research tools also help you to:
- Eliminate availability bias by providing you with an accurate picture of what’s going on in your customers’ minds
- Align different departments so market research stops existing in a silo and get everyone’s buy-in when implementing the insights you get after data analysis
- Understand industry trends to help you adapt and position yourself to meet customer needs and expectations
- Understand how customers behave during the buyer’s journey to help you deliver a better customer experience
That said, deciding the kind of market research tool to use isn’t something you have to figure out alone. There are a lot of options out there that provide lots of information about your market allowing you to make better marketing decisions. Here’s a list of the 12 best market research tools I recommend:
The 12 Best Market Research Tools
- Qualtrics
- SurveyMonkey
- TypeForm
- Statista
- SimilarWeb
- BuzzSumo
- Loop11
- BrandMentions
- Think With Google
- SEMrush
- Crayon
- Hotjar
1. Qualtrics
As of 2018, Qualtrics was one of the most favorite tools for market research, with 40% of marketers using it to collect data and uncover useful insights from their data.
And it’s easy to see why, given that it is an all-in-one market research platform, taking care of all your market research needs.
Qualtrics is powered by AI and automation meaning that speed, efficiency, and accuracy are baked into its DNA.
Looking through the tool, you’ll find a wide range of features and options available for you when conducting market research and uncovering useful insights from the data you collect:
For instance, there’s product development and pricing, which allows you to involve customers during critical stages in product development. Use this feature to:
- Evaluate product-market-fit to avoid saturating the market with a product customers don’t need
- Test different product concepts to make sure your product resonates with customers
- Test different pricing points and models to find out what customers are willing to pay for
- Test what packaging customers prefer to align it with what they desire
And the best part is that Qualtrics allows you to collect all this information from 125 sources and 27 different channels. This makes sure that you have enough variety in the data you collect and avoid availability bias;
As you collect insights from these sources, there’s also iQ, which uses AI to help you uncover unique insights from your data faster, helping you save time.
I also love the fact that in addition to offering a market research tool, Qualtrics also comes with a flexible service model that allows you to either:
- Outsource your research to market research experts from Qualtrics or
- Work together with a market research expert to guide you through the technical details of market research using Qualtrics
Qualtrics also provides on-demand training to users helping them learn how to make the most out of the different features the tool provides. If you’re a researcher looking to grow your career, Quatrics provides certifications to give you the credibility you need when reaching out to and working with your clients.
When it comes to integrations, Qualtrics goes beyond the basics by providing you with a wide range of tools that integrate with it. Take a look:
So if you’re looking to dive deep into market research to collect customer feedback without spending too much time on the process to uncover useful insights, Qualtrics is one of the best market research tools around.
2. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey comes with three core solutions for large scale market research using surveys:
- Market knowledge
- Product innovation
- Brand and creative development.
Depending on the information you want to get from your market, each of these solutions comes with different options to help you get the feedback you need from your customers through running better surveys.
For example, if you’re looking to understand your market better, use the tool to track current trends in your industry in specific product categories. You can also collect data to help you segment your customers, their preferences, and buying habits.
When using surveys during market research, three elements determine the quality of insights you get: the questions you ask, the people you ask, and how you analyze the responses you get.
Putting these three elements together to create effective surveys can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to figure out everything from scratch.
SurveyMonkey has account managers to help you set things up fast, start your research as soon as possible, and in-house market research experts to help you design effective surveys.
And when it comes to ensuring that you get high-quality data from your surveys, SurveyMonkey:
- Verifies the location and emails of respondents to prevent fraud and duplicate responses in the same survey
- Works with trusted partners who work with panelists in more than 130 countries
- Limits the number of survey invitations to prevent professional survey taking
SurveyMonkey also integrates with more than 100 tools and apps, making it easy for you to optimize your research process:
After creating your survey and sending it out to your respondents, SurveyMonkey uses AI to analyze your responses in real-time.
It also comes with an inbuilt word cloud tool to help you analyze survey responses and identify commonly used words and phrases.
Word clouds cover blindspots that you may not uncover through observation alone.
SurveyMonkey’s AI analysis helps you uncover insights from the responses, their themes, and the emotions behind these responses, helping you derive better insights from your survey responses. Once you’re done with the analysis, SurveyMonkey allows you to compare your insights with industry benchmarks for accuracy.
Another cool feature is the Audience panel, which Wrike, a product management platform used to conduct a survey, analyze the responses they got, and uncover insights that helped them create viral content. Here’s their story;
So whether you’re just getting started with marketing research or you want to refine the information you have about your target market, SurveyMonkey will come in handy to help you get the insights you need.
3. Typeform
It is impossible to have a conversation about market research tools and fail to mention Ty
They’ve always been a crowd favorite in small business circles, given that they make it easy for you to create and manage your market research process using online surveys.
And going by Typeform’s tagline, “there’s a better way to ask” they’ve put a premium on creating simple online surveys that your customers are willing to complete. For starters, the average survey completion rate reduces as the number of survey questions increases;
Given that you’re not the only one sending out surveys to your customers a 65% response rate seems ideal. Also, anything more than eight questions per survey will lead to survey fatigue and a lower completion rate.
So if you’ve struggled with getting a good response rate and your surveys have less than eight questions, here’s how Typeform will help improve your survey completion rate;
It offers you different forms and survey templates for the different types of surveys you want to run:
Using each of these templates, Typeform ensures that respondents see and answer only one question at a time:
From a visual perspective, a single question with multiple choices isn’t overwhelming for your respondents. It also helps them build the momentum they need to answer all your questions by answering one question at a time.
Your respondents have different preferences and to make the survey relevant to them, you want to make sure your questions are relevant to them. Use logic jumps in Typeform to present the next question a respondent sees depending on the answers they provide:
The result is that your surveys will be shorter and you’ll get high-quality responses.
Embed Typeform on relevant pages on your website as a popup, on your sidebar, slider, a full-page embed, among other options to help you get the responses you need from your web visitors:
I also like VideoAsk, one of their latest features which lets you take things a step further by recording your survey questions. In addition to giving the survey a human touch, you can provide more context around each question to help your respondents better understand what you need from them:
Note that respondents also have an option to respond using video, text, or record an audio message. If they’ve got a lot to say, it won’t feel like they have to do a lot of work typing a long response yet they can record an audio or video.
If you’re running a small business, looking for a simple tool that will help you conduct market research to collect customer feedback and valuable insights, keep things simple, and save money while at it, then Typeform should be your first port of call.
4. Statista
If you want to keep up with the latest trends in your industry, forecasts, surveys, and studies, then you’ll love Statista.
It presents valuable insights from the data they collect using neat charts and a high level summary of the key takeaways for the information you’re looking for. Here, there’s no learning curve to help you understand how Statista works.
Start by entering what you need to know about into the search bar and wait for it to provide you with the insights you’re looking for:
Then choose what kind of insights you want from the different categories you see:
Given that market trends evolve, Statista is transparent about the insights they present. Every statistic comes with a date showing when the data was collected, the number of respondents, their region, and demographic information. You also have different options to download the information you get:
You also have access to their market outlooks feature that provides you with analysis of trends from more than 150 countries:
And if you’re looking to understand what drives consumer behavior, take a look at their 2021 global consumer survey:
Accessing ready-made insights might not be the same as conducting your own surveys and analysing your responses to come up with unique insights.
However, since Statista provides you with the latest trends and insights about a given topic then you’ll have an easier time when conducting surveys because you have background information about a topic you want to dig deeper.
For example, you might feel the need to dig deeper to understand the why behind the growing revenues from email marketing. With all the information Statista provides, you already know who to ask (business owners) and the kind of questions to ask e.g. “how do you use email marketing to grow your businesses?”
Statista also provides a done for you market research service for those who don’t have the resources or time to conduct research and analyse their data.
Using a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and analytical research methods, their done for your research service comes with the following options:
- Brand tracking and image studies
- Market monitoring and tracking
- Marketing and PR studies
- Price and product research
- Target group and cluster analysis
- Customer and employee satisfaction
- Market potential and forecast calculation
- B2B market research
For example, their target group and cluster analysis research service provide you with the information you need about your target market, their buying patterns, and their segments.
This information allows you to narrow down your targeting and get a better ROI from your marketing campaigns.
Putting it all together, you’ll realize that Statista isn’t only a pretty tool with a database of insights to help you with market research to identify market trends.
More than 23,000 companies have worked with them led by Adobe, T-Mobile, PayPal, and Samsung to gain insights about their respective markets to improve their marketing strategies.
5. SimilarWeb
Although SimilarWeb has always come across as a website traffic and analytics tool, it has evolved into a formidable market research tool in recent years.
Take a look at a brand like redBus — an online ticket booking service for buses — that has been using it for competitive research and keeping up with industry trends, and it’s clear that SimilarWeb is a solid market research tool.
SimilarWeb has a ton of data from different websites, apps, and industries that allows you to access the information you need about your market such as emerging trends, different industry players, their size, and market share.
So if you’re looking to enter into a new market, you’re going to get enough information that helps you identify opportunities in the market, accurately evaluate market size to see if it is ideal for your product and business goals.
If the information you get from the tool aligns with your business objectives, you’ll then start working on a product launch strategy to enter new markets and establish yourself as a key player.
Similarweb also provides you with an intuitive interface that grows with your needs, giving you control over how you want to access the information you need about your market.
Use the dashboard to create custom categories to track trends you’re interested in to help shape your ongoing marketing strategy.
You can also sort through your data to identify critical insights such as traffic, engagement, and conversions to help you know how your competitors are doing as you compare that with your own performance.
One of SimilarWeb’s cool features is conversion funnel and customer journey analytics which allows you to zoom into your customer’s buying journey to see the different touchpoints, the actions they take, and the channels that lead to conversions.
This information allows you to optimize their buying experience by being present on relevant channels and allocate your resources where they’re needed to help buyers move to the next stage in their journey.
You can also track trends in product searches, to see how you compare against other industry players, and the level of your brand awareness;
With all these features, you’re not only getting a market research tool. SimilarWeb’s market research features will help align your sales and marketing teams to help optimize marketing efforts and improve conversions because they have access to the information they need about your target market.
6. BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo is primarily designed for brands that want to identify high performing content in their niche and find influencers they want to collaborate with.
In fact, most users report that the tool has come in handy during market research to inform their content marketing strategy, saving them lots of time in the process.
As Hannah Smith from Distilled puts it, “Historically discovering the most shared content on competitor sites was a slow and painful process – crawl the site with your crawler of choice, clean up your URLs, then use the social APIs to pull back social share data on each URL. With BuzzSumo you can search by domain and modify that search with a topic.”
Now, she uses the tool to identify relevant content that resonates with her target audience and identify gaps in existing content, fast.
Some of the features that help you with during market research features to strengthen your content marketing efforts are such as:
- Competitor intelligence
- Content strategy
- Crisis alerts
- Digital PR
- Influencer research
- Video marketing
Buzzsumo’s content strategy feature allows you to find popular content and topics from different sources and angles organized in six different categories:
These categories help paint a clear picture as to what topics are already resonating with your audience. With this information, it is easier to narrow down and choose relevant topics that will help you gain traction.
When it comes to identifying gaps in existing content, Buzzsumo helps you look at the content your competitors are publishing to:
- Identify their content topics and angles,
- Understand how deep they go when covering these topics,
- See how they distribute their content, and
- Identify the mistakes they’re making to help you avoid repeating them.
Besides that, BuzzSumo seems to be catching up with growing demand for video content by providing you with insights to help you create better video content.
Use the video marketing feature to identify videos that are already doing well in your niche.
You’ll also see relevant statistics such as popular topics, the length of the video, and the best channels to post these videos.
With this information, you’re going to create a better video marketing strategy that complements your content marketing efforts to help you get the results you’re looking for,.
So if you’re looking for a tool to help you with market research to understand what content works for your target audience, how to distribute it using the right channels, and work with the right influencers to promote it, then Buzzsumo is one of the best tools I would recommend.
7. Loop11
The kind of experience users have on your website and product determines your conversion rate and whether you retain users who sign up to use your product.
Loop11 helps you identify what elements get in the way of providing a great user experience on your website and products so that you know what to improve upon to increase engagement and conversions.
Clients cut across all industries from government institutions, retailers, educational institutions, digital agencies, software companies, and big corporations.
If you fall into any of these categories then Loop11 will come in handy in market research by revealing how your target market interacts with your website or products.
Here are some of the notable features:
Choose moderated or unmoderated testing options then Identify users who will perform real tasks on your website, understand what they do once they visit your website, what hurdles get in the way of conversions, and why they leave.
With moderated user testing, you (or someone on your team) interacts with 5-8 users as they navigate through your website, collecting their thoughts, views and studying their non-verbal cues;
You can also test different designs to see which one works better for users depending on the information you collect during testing.
Loop11 also allows you to test how your website renders on different devices, allowing you to optimize for usability depending on the device a customer is using when visiting your website.
Take things a step further with its benchmarking feature to compare how well optimized your website for usability as compared to your competitors.
In addition to knowing what works for your web visitors, benchmarking helps you reverse engineer what your competitors are doing, steer clear of their mistakes and stand out from the pack.
To avoid spending a lot of time developing new products that users don’t like, use Loop11 to test your prototype and wireframes and get feedback on what users expect, solve design issues, and improve on your concepts faster.
Loop11 will provide you with a range of metrics such as heatmaps, time spent on tasks, task completion rate, heatmaps among others so you have enough information to uncover useful insights about how users behave on your website and apps.
If you don’t have your own participants to work with when conducting user testing, use Loop11’s panel of verified participants to save you time and money in the process.
You also have an option of working with their consultants to guide you through user testing or even conduct testing on your behalf.
Finally, one thing I like about this tool is its flexibility. If you want to run tests for a few months, then that’s fine. There’s no contract you’ll have to sign forcing you to commit to using the tool beyond the scope of your needs. Start with their free trial and if youreal-time, like it, start using the tool and enjoy all these features without tons of red tape.
8. BrandMentions
As a market research tool, BrandMentions helps you identify what your prospects and customers are saying about your brand online to help inform your social media marketing strategy.
Using BrandMentions’ Boolean search, combine different search terms and include modifiers such as NOT, AND, OR to capture every conversation that’s going about your brand and different topics in your niche.
You can also include negative keywords to help you get hold of mentions that fall outside your keywords to get comprehensive results as some people might use variations of your brand name or make spelling mistakes when talking about your brand.
Most of your prospects are on a buying journey and sometimes, reaching out to friends on social media platforms for advice helps them make informed buying decisions.
Use BrandMentions’ competitor spying feature to keep tabs with what your competitors are saying and what other people are saying about them online.
The information it provides allows you to identify potential business opportunities and fill in existing gaps in the market. Take a look at this example below:
If you follow the thread, you’ll find some suggesting some of the tools they like and are already using and others share their views on tools they didn’t like.
However, the highlight of the conversation is when we have brands like Zoho showing up when mentioned to contribute to the conversation or thank someone who recommended them.
So if you’ve set alerts inside BrandMentions tracking HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and other marketing automation tools, then you’ll be among the first few to notice that there are opportunities with offering integrations, more features, and even friendlier pricing to get more customers.
To make it easier for you to conduct research and keep track of all the information you get, BrandMentions allows you to organize your searches into dashboards.
In your dashboard, filter your data by location, language, number of mentions, and trending hashtags to keep things organized.
These dashboards are shareable so other team members can access different dashboards, and assign custom roles for each team member making it easier for you to share the data you collect without having to export anything from the tool.
BrandMentions also comes with a sentiment analysis feature to help you understand the relationship between what people are talking about and how they feel to help you get in touch with their needs and improve your communications strategy on all your channels.
9. Think with Google
Google Trends and Google PageSpeed Insights sound familiar, right?
What you might not be aware of is that these two tools are part of Think With Google, a market research tool that provides you with different market insights to help improve your marketing strategy.
These insights are divided into four categories:
- Consumer insights
- Marketing strategies
- Future of Marketing
- Tools
What you see in each category varies depending on where you’re searching from as Think With Google wants to make sure you’re accessing relevant information.
For example, consumer insights provides case studies and trends on consumer behavior and insights on the consumer’s buying journey in form of reports, articles, presents, and videos.
Next, we have tools that come in to complement the information you get from other categories.
If you’re in e-commerce, use the Rising Retail Categories to identify different products that people are searching for, the regions they are searching from, and the terms they use to search;
I also like that Rising Retail Categories provides monthly results given that Google users search for different items during different times of the year.
And if you want to enter a new market, use Market Finder to help you narrow down to specific markets that have lots of potential. Here’s the Market Finder tool in action:
Step 1: Enter your URL and let the tool identify categories for you
Step 2: Review and confirm your categories. Feel free to add more categories if you want to:
Step 3: Once you’ve confirmed your categories, go ahead and choose where you want to see your market from the options available. Chose globally or in the region you’re searching from;
4: Choose the market you want to enter from the recommendations you get from Market Finder;
You’ll note that Think with Google isn’t as sophisticated as other market research tools we’re talking about here. However, that doesn’t diminish its usefulness in providing you with information about your target market.
After all, Google is the biggest search engine meaning that most of the information it provides is from everyone who uses it for search purposes.
10. SEMrush
In addition to offering five different toolkits that help you manage all your marketing activities in one place, SEMrush also offers market analysis tools that help you understand your market better and build effective marketing funnels.
To do this, you need to:
- Understand your audience, their needs, and expectations to align your content with what they’re looking for
- Study what your competitors are doing to understand how they build brand awareness, engage prospects, and convert their leads.
Use the market explorer by SEMrush to identify who your competitors are, your growth opportunities, and what products to introduce in the market;
Then study their traffic sources and see how that compares with your traffic sources;
But don’t stop there. Dig deeper to understand how heavily your competitors rely on each traffic source;
Armed with this information, you can then decide what channels to focus on and the techniques you’ll use to get more traffic to help you build brand awareness and outrank your competitors on search engines.
When analyzing a new market to expand your reach, Market Explorer provides you with demographic and geographical information about your target market.
It will also provide you with the topics your audience is interested in to help you create content that keeps them engaged and earns their trust.
And if you’re managing a wide range of products or even operating in different geographical regions, then you’ll need to customize competitor tracking for easier analysis.
SEMrush allows you to create custom lists depending on your needs, add competitors then start tracking their activity.
The other main feature is traffic analytics, which comes with a subfolders report to help you dive deeper into a competitor’s pages to:
- Identify pages in your competitor’s sites that drive the most traffic to identify the topic or new product your audience is interested in
- Identify the techniques they are using to drive traffic to these pages and use them to expand or improve your traffic acquisition strategy.
The traffic analytics tools also provide you with information about user journeys to help you understand the path buyers take on their journey before buying from you.
These insights help you identify gaps that your marketing funnel needs to fill in with relevant content and channels where you need to show up through PR and online advertising to drive qualified traffic to your website.
11. Crayon
With Crayon, you’ll find everything you need to conduct competitive research to improve your product and brand positioning in the market.
Unlike other competitive research tools, Crayon goes above and beyond to provide different almost everything you need to know about your competitors:
And it doesn’t stop there. Crayon allows you to keep track of the A/B tests your competitors are conducting and the new landing pages they’re publishing to help you stay a step ahead of them or even find ways to outdo their efforts.
Using its intuitive interface, customize your dashboard to access all your data so you need and share it with team members using email or Slack to ensure that you have a single source of truth and make it easier to make decisions without unnecessary friction.
Before deciding which tool to use, prospects have two or more options on their list to choose from. How do you make sure you stand out from your competitors especially when you have overlapping features?
By using Crayon’s sales battle cards which provide you with insights about your competitors, their product, and ideas to help you win a deal against a competitor. Using their Salesforce CRM integration, sales reps can access these battle cards in one place, helping them to stay organized and efficient.
Michael Greene, Klaviyo’s Product Marketing Manager has nothing but praises for the battle cards they use from Crayon;
“I always have Crayon running in the background, providing me with constant competitive updates that I can reference at any moment…Our competitive win rates have increased as much as 59% since rolling out Crayon Battlecards.”
You can also customize these battle cards and add or remove different elements that your team needs to focus on to improve conversions.
Crayon constantly updates these battle cards such that whenever a competitor introduces a new feature, changes their pricing, or even enters a new market you’ll know.
That means your sales team is always aware of where you excel against your competitors and are able to provide a clear picture of what you offer to help prospects make an informed decision.
Besides, all this information inside a sales battle card improves productivity because sales reps no longer have to figure things out from scratch whenever they have to attend a sales call.
I also like that Crayon has email alerts to keep you in the loop about what you need to know about your competitors. Crayon analysts also share their insights and trends you need to pay attention to in your industry to improve your brand positioning.
12. Hotjar
When using Hotjar as a market research tool to collect customer feedback and analyze issues with your product or website, there are four main features you’ll be interested in:
- Surveys
- Heatmaps
- Incoming feedback
- Recordings
For example, if you want to understand the role your content plays in your buyer’s journey,
conduct a survey to understand what’s going on from their perspective.
This information gives you insights into what works for your audience and an in-depth understanding of what problems that your content helps them solve.
This tool also allows you to collect real time feedback from users, know pages that users like interacting with and important pages as well as valuable pages that aren’t getting the attention they deserve:
Hotjar allows you to collect feedback in more than 40 languages so you’re not limited to using the tool in a specific geographical location.
Given that mobile purchases will account for 54% of total sales in e-commerce, then you need to get rid of hurdles that your mobile visitors find when accessing your store from their mobile devices to improve conversions.
Start by tracking their level of engagement on different devices using Hotjar’s heatmaps feature:
You can even record these sessions and see your website from your user’s lenses to understand their behavior, why they leave or choose to use a different device to visit your site.
Hotjar works with different types of website builders and e-commerce platforms. It also integrates with different tools to help optimize your research process and make it easier to share insights with your team.
Finally, no matter how big your team is or the number of clients you’re serving, you won’t have to pay for an extra seat for them to access the tool.
So if you’re looking for a simple tool that’s easy to set up and use to collect customer feedback, insights, study user behavior on all your web properties, backed up by great customer support, you’ll definitely want to consider Hotjar.
Conclusion
Thanks to the market research tools in this post, you won’t need to spend a lot of time deciding which market research tool to use and whether each tool has what you’re looking for to conduct market research.
And now that you have a list of tools to choose from, there’s one more question you need to answer;
Which market research tool is right for you? Personally, it depends.
Market research means different things to different people at different times. For some, it’s collecting customer feedback and insights to evaluate the demand for a product they want to launch.
Some use it to keep track of trends in their industry, track competitor activity, or even understand what’s ailing their business. Others want to dive deep and collect all the insights they can get while others want to keep things simple for now.
So whatever your goals are right now, let them guide you to choosing the tool you’re going to use, and then go ahead and collect all the information you need about your market.
And if your goals change, come back and pick a different tool to conduct market research.