15 Best market research tools in 2024

Whether you're launching a new product or service, looking to increase customer engagement, or boosting brand loyalty, it’s always necessary to turn to data and insights to understand what’s going on. This research can give a picture of current and potential customers in the marketplace and help validate an action you want to take to increase sales.

However, the market research process can be challenging, time-consuming, and confusing. That’s where research tools can help. Market research tools help to measure, identify, simplify, and increase the accuracy of your processes—all to better your product or service research journey.

Fortunately, we’ve done the hard work to find some of the best research tools to use in 2023. Let’s explore!

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Market research tools are designed to simplify the process of gathering, storing, and understanding data and information.

They can help a team to clearly identify a market for their product or service, as well as gain key feedback from current and potential customers.

A broad range of market research tools is useful at various stages of the research process. Some tools help speed up the process of gathering data. Others are helpful once you’ve collected data, as they allow you to easily view and manage information and then draw valuable insights.

Ultimately, market research tools can help make the research process easier and more straightforward.

The right market research tools in a business can streamline the research phases while helping to ensure a new product or service succeeds. 

There are a range of ways market research tools can help businesses. These include: 

• Reducing manual processes. Manual research tasks can be highly time-consuming for teams. Tools can reduce the time it takes to complete research tasks, helping move projects forwards.

• Increased accuracy. With large amounts of data, it’s easy for people to make mistakes. The wrong insights, after all, can prove highly damaging for a business. However, the right tool can improve the accuracy of data collected, ensuring that you base your decision-making on facts.

• Removes bias. When teams rely too heavily on assumptions, they miss the chance to discover what users are really thinking and feeling. By relying more on market research tools, you reduce bias from team members and gain clarity on what the research is showing.

• Faster data collection. Collecting data can take a long time and involve multiple team members. With the use of tools, there’s the chance to automate many tasks, making the process much faster and simpler.

• Better accessibility. Outsourcing market research to independent firms can be time-consuming and costly. However, a business might not have the resources to conduct, collate, and draw meaningful insights from research. Market research tools better enable businesses to conduct research without person power—making the process accessible even to a small business.

Market research tools are becoming increasingly common. Choosing the right tool(s) will depend largely on your needs, goals, and overall business strategy.

Before deciding, it’s helpful to consider the different types of tools and how they might help your research.

The most common types of research tools include:

Customer relationship management (CRM) software

CRM tools record key customer data to help build a picture of customer engagement and loyalty. This is very useful as a deep understanding of your customers is essential when releasing new products, services, and features.

Survey tools

Surveys are one of the most common research techniques, as they help a business team deeply understand what customers want and need. Survey tools can hasten the process of gathering data, increase the chances of completion, and improve accuracy.

Data analysis software

Data tools can help you efficiently collect and store data. They’re also helpful for analyzing that data and quickly gaining valuable insights from a vast range of sources.

Social media monitoring

Social tools help businesses to draw insights about social campaigns and statistics to drive interest online. They can also analyze trends and allows teams to understand their current and potential customers better.

Competitive intelligence tools

Competitor tools help a team to understand what their competitors are doing. By analyzing competitors' profits, sales, trends, and customers, you gain a better chance to understand market needs and wants, giving you the opportunity to offer something new and innovative.

Business intelligence tools

To help businesses plan more accurately, business intelligence tools help with forecasting, goal setting, and business strategies. 

Below are some of the best market research tools in 2023.

Statista

Accurate market and consumer data should drive business decisions—not assumptions made by teams.

That’s where Statista can help. Statista is an online platform focused on consumer and market data. With access to data from 150+ countries and regions, their market insights help stakeholders to forecast growth, revenue, sales, and more. 

You can also find trending statistics, current popular topics, and expert research, which can all build a deep understanding of your market. 

Statista offers their starter plan at $39 per month, though they do have a free introduction plan to allow users to get to know the platform first. 

SurveyMonkey

Surveys are an important market research tool. They give your customers, or potential customers, a chance to make their voices heard. Those insights are ones a business can act upon to make improvements and release better products or services. 

SurveyMonkey enables business teams to quickly create and send surveys, quizzes, and polls through email, web links, or embedded forms. From there, they can receive responses from key people, gain insights, and take action on feedback. 

The platform has hundreds of templates to choose from, meaning that you don’t have to build a survey from scratch or need any design nous to get started. 

SurveyMonkey also offers a free option, which caps surveys at ten questions. This is an attractive option for small businesses and teams wanting to start conducting surveys. 

Google Trends

Curious about what people are or aren’t interested in at the moment? Jumping on trends and creating things that are wanted now is one important way to secure market share. 

Google Trends is a tool that anyone from a journalist to a business founder or UX Specialist can benefit from. It visualizes what search terms people are using on the internet, almost in real time.

The tool has featured insights, a search engine option to see what’s currently popular, and the chance to dive deeper into data. You can also compare one topic to another to see the interest over time—with information dating back to 2004. 

Regardless of what you’re developing, Google Trends is a tool every team releasing new products can benefit from. Even better, it’s a free tool, making it accessible to all. 

SpyFu

Marketing revenue engine SpyFu helps businesses to understand and take the guesswork out of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. 

Through competitor analysis, rank tracking, and keyword research, SpyFu helps companies create content with better SEO. And with a Google Ads analyzer, ad templates, and competitor analysis, they can also boost success with marketed ads. 

SpyFu also has competitor software that allows customers to see ranks, ads, backlinks, and keywords to better understand the competition. To help stakeholders to track and improve success, they also provide detailed reporting tools. 

Basic plans for SpyFu start at $16 per month with options to upgrade for greater access. 

BuzzSumo

Designed with public relations professionals and content marketers in mind, BuzzSumo enables users to see what’s in the news, find trends, track company mentions, and gain ideas for new content. 

The tool helps people to discover popular content, uncover top stories from competitors, and see what their customers are interested in. It also allows stakeholders to quickly react to negative mentions, competitors' comments, or industry announcements. 

With a huge library of data and content, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool popular with creatives and marketers alike. 

The tool does come at a price, with a single-user plan costing ​​$119 per month. 

Think With Google

Think With Google provides key data and insight to help businesses understand shifts in beliefs, behaviors, and needs in geographic regions. 

These consumer insights and market trends can provide interesting perspectives for the forecasting and planning of marketing strategies.  

Using Think With Google can boost business ideas, drive business decisions, and help marketers succeed in a competitive marketplace. And similar to Google Trends, Think With Google is a free tool. 

Typeform

Completing a survey isn’t always a fun or desirable activity for a busy potential or current customer. Surveys take time to fill out, and many customers would prefer to get on with their day. 

With that in mind, Typeform created people-friendly surveys, forms, and quizzes that are enjoyable to complete. 

With dedicated designs that aren’t only aesthetically pleasing but simple to use, stakeholders can create something unique and appealing for consumers without the need for design work. 

Typeform also has a video feature to allow more in-depth questions—something that can be very useful for some projects. 

A basic plan with Typeform starts at $25 per month. 

Semrush

Semrush helps companies improve their SEO, PPC, competitor research, and content marketing. 

It does this by offering SEO audits, actionable tips, traffic analysis, and a keyword research tool to drive successful marketing. It’s also a social media scheduling tool with post analysis to boost successful social marketing. 

When it comes to competitor research, Semrush also provides competitor analysis through tracking and assessing other websites, visibility on competitor promotion strategies, and access to keyword and backlink gaps, which you can use to grow market share. 

Semrush’s base plans start at $119.95 per month. 

US Census Bureau

When developing new products and services, you want to get as much information about your target market as possible. What better way than looking at the Census Bureau data? 

The Census data gives accurate and detailed information about the American public and economy, which is critical to understanding the potential market for a product or service. This sort of data gives you the ‘big picture’ of your customer base and is often the backbone or initial supporting data for your market research project. Participation in the US Census is mandatory, ensuring that you have access to a huge dataset of accurate information. 

It does have some limitations. Given the Census is only taken every ten years, the information can become outdated quickly. Also, it may not be specific or detailed enough to relate to your particular project. 

But given it’s free for all to access, it’s a great starting point for general research. 

Similarweb

Competitor analysis is an essential part of any successful market research journey. Similarweb allows users to analyze any website or app to understand how competitors are positioning themselves in the market by measuring their digital traffic. 

Insights include total visits, global rank, country rank, pages per visit, and bounce rate. Within the platform, you can also easily find similarly ranked sites to compare and contrast to your own. 

Importantly, Similarweb provides traffic and engagement analysis with demographic information, other visited websites, and audience interests. This provides a vast amount of information to accurately compare your website and app with competitors, giving you a much clearer picture of what your customers are interested in and where you stand in the marketplace.

Similarweb offers plenty of free tools and business quotes for those interested in paid plans. 

Tableau

Business intelligence tool, Tableau, is designed to help companies gain helpful insights from data. Those insights can drive business decisions, generate accurate planning, and improve forecasting. 

A visual analytics platform, the tool is useful for data management, visual storytelling, and collaboration between team members. 

With a dedicated dashboard, providing a range of key analytics, discovering how your business is performing (and where it could do better) is straightforward. They also offer end-to-end data for a complete picture. 

Individual plans with Tableau start at $70 per month. 

Facebook Audience Insights

For some businesses, Facebook advertising drives campaigns, boosts sales, and grows customer engagement. 

Facebook Audience Insights help business owners discover more than just what their competitors are doing. The tool provides aggregated information to show data from those who are already connected to the business and another set to provide information about those generally on Facebook. This key information can drive awareness of new customers and increase the chances of boosting interest and growing a customer base.

Specifically, Facebook Audience Insights provides demographic information, key interests, and lifestyle data to build a picture of your current and potential customers. Even better, the tool is free to use. 

Quora

Question and answer platform, Quora, isn’t technically a research tool. Because it holds an incredible amount of information, it can help content marketers and product developers uncover key topics of interest. 

With 300 million monthly users, Quora provides direct insight into what people are curious about and what they’re discussing on the many message boards. Within the platform, there’s a never-ending supply of content ideas that can be highly useful for new products and services and feature ideation.  

This platform is also free for everyone to use. 

BrandMentions

When wanting to increase brand loyalty and engagement—not only do you need an accurate tool to track that data—you also need to understand who’s talking about your business and where. 

BrandMentions does just that. The tool helps businesses manage their brand reputation, acquire new customers, and retain current ones, all while engaging with customers and key influencers.

With BrandMentions, it’s simpler to accurately measure the success of campaigns, track social media mentions and performance, measure brand performance, and monitor hashtags.

Plans with BrandMentions start at $99 per month.

Dovetail

The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Dovetail. Dovetail ensures that you can store customer research, feedback, and insights in one streamlined place—all to empower your team with accurate decision-making.

Regardless of whether the user data came through a survey, a focus group, usability testing, or product feedback, Dovetail also enables you to analyze your market research data and generate insights that can help you understand your customer and competition.

The platform also has templates for anything from analyzing competitors to gaining feedback or running an employee engagement survey. Dovetail can help you complete research that’ll have a real impact.