15+ Essential Market Research Tools and Skills For Data-Driven Strategies

No matter the industry, the most insightful information about relevant figures or data about development potential and customers can be acquired from doing market research. Market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market, a product, or a service. Market research is essential for business success, as it can help identify new opportunities, reduce risks, and improve decision-making.

If you are interested in pursuing a career in the market research field, this article is for you. In this article, you’ll find all you need to know about market research tools, from what they are, which job functions require them, and a list of essential market research tools that can help you conduct effective and efficient research. These tools can help you collect data, analyze data, visualize data, and present insights. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you will find something useful in this article.

Different Types of Market Research Tools

The process of conducting market research comes with different stages. It starts from collecting data about your target market, processing data, interpreting data, and presenting the insight gained from the data. There are different tools with specific features that can be useful for each stage.

Market research tools can be softwares, applications or platforms that help researchers perform different tasks related to market research. These market research softwares are often classified into four categories:

• Data collection tools: help researchers gather primary or secondary data from various sources, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, web analytics, social media, etc. 

• Data analysis tools: support researchers process, clean, and manipulate data to discover patterns, trends, and insights. 
• Data visualization tools: play a vital role in creating visual representations as charts, graphs, maps, dashboards.
• Data presentation tools: help researchers prepare and deliver reports, presentations based on their findings.

Job Functions Requiring Market Research Tool Skills

Now that you know what market research tools are, it’s helpful to know which job roles require the use of these tools to help you in your career journey. 

To put it simply, any role whose responsibilities require market insights and knowledge would find market research tools useful. Here are job positions that will require frequent use of market research platforms:

• Market research analysts who are responsible for designing, conducting, and analyzing market research projects. From the data, they can make recommendations to clients or stakeholders.
• Marketing managers who plan, implement, and evaluate marketing strategies. They can use market research tools to understand the market situation, customer needs, and competitor actions.
• Product managers who are concerned about developing and launching new products or features. They can use market research tools to identify customer problems, validate product ideas, and test product performance.
• Business analysts whose responsibility is analyzing and improving business processes, and use market research tools to understand the current state, identify gaps, and propose solutions.
• Data scientists can use market research tools to acquire, process, and visualize data, and to generate insights and predictions; before applying advanced data analysis and machine learning techniques to solve complex business problems

15 Best Market Research Tools For Gathering & Visualizing Market Research Data

1. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a great survey creation tool that can be used to conduct market research. The tool stands out as a versatile and user-friendly platform designed for crafting and distributing surveys tailored to various research needs. It lets you design and launch everything from quick opinion polls to deep-dive market research questionnaires. SurveyMonkey is known for its ease of use, making it a favorite for beginners and experts alike.

This market research tool gives you everything you need for online surveys. From creating and customizing surveys as required with a variety of templates as well as tons of question types (multiple choice, ratings, open text, etc.). Once created, users can share surveys via email, social media platforms, unique links or embed them to a website.

Once collected, survey results can be transformed into actionable insights with data analysis tools. In addition, the application also has a feature to help eliminate biased answers to ensure the integrity of data.

2. Statista

More than just surveys – Satista is a massive market research database and a powerful analysis tool. It’s specifically designed to provide users with a vast repository of statistics and insights for market analysis and business planning. Here you can find ready-to-use data, market reports, consumer insights, and forecasts on a vast range of industries and topics.

With a huge amount of data, over 1 million statistics on 80,000 topics from 170 industries across 150 countries, users can search almost all the information and data they need at Statista. This platform also has filter options to help optimize search & discovery and help users easily identify trend spotting. Last but not least, the platform's market research data is made easy to understand and present with visualizations ranging from customizable charts, graphs, and infographics.

3. Census Bureau

If you are looking for a source to help you collect data on macro aspects such as economics or demographics - Census Bureau can help. The platform is primarily designed to understand population patterns, business trends, and economic indicators across communities and industries.

The platform provides an open data source that helps you explore data on topics like income, housing, age distribution, business ownership, and more. Data on the platform also helps users retrieve key statistics such as retail sales, trade patterns, and business formation. Also, for specific locations or industries, the platform helps to build data profiles with pre-constructed reports and summaries.

4. Tableau

After collecting data, you have too much raw data but don't know how to process it? Let Tableau help you promptly visualize and analyze your data. It is designed to transform your raw data into visually stunning and interactive dashboards, making complex insights easier to digest and act upon.

One of the first outstanding features of the application is its user friendliness. Just by drag-and-drop, Tableau helps users create charts, graphs, maps, and more on dashboards from diverse data inputs such as spreadsheets, databases, surveys.

In addition, the real-time data retrieval feature helps analyze data as it’s updated. Users can also speed up the creation of visualizations with pre-built templates. Professionally, the tool can be used on both phones and many different devices, not to mention it can be combined with other work management applications such as ERP, CRM to visualize output data.

5. Google Trends

Google Trends is a free market research tool for social listening. Just by some specific keywords and search, you can have insights into the popularity of search terms and topics across various regions and languages, helping you understand public interest. 

Google Trends offers data on what people are searching for as it happens, and for sure, the first benefit also the key feature users can gain from the platform is real-time data. Along with that, you can compare search volume as well as analyze historical trends. With the geographical insights that this platform brings, market researchers can easily search for related topics to optimize their time, efficiency and resources.

6. Typeform

If you need to gather customer feedback, conduct lead generation surveys, or make market research more enjoyable for participants, Typeform is an ideal tool. Typeform can help you transform traditional surveys and questionnaires into visually appealing, conversational experiences that increase response rates.

The first key feature of Typeform is to create questionnaires with various question types (such as multiple choice, ratings, or image selection). Beside its main feature to perform market research with templates and customization, the tool can be integrated with other services to enhance its functionality. 

7. Qualtrics

For professional market research professionals, Qualtrics is the top contender for an all-in-one market research platform. The tools help researchers collect deep data from the market, for example helping businesses design products that satisfy customers, increase market share, and build enduring brands.

With Qualtrics, users can create sophisticated surveys with branching logic, quotas, and a variety of question types. In addition, to help users analyze collected data deeper to get useful insights, Qualtrics also provides combined complex quant and qual research tools, helping market researchers uncover hidden sentiment. Recently, the tool also applied AI technology to the analysis process, contributing to finding deep insights as well as predicting trends based on collected data. 

8. BrandMentions

"How do customers feel about my brand?" This is probably something brands are always concerned about. And if you need to stay on top of your brand's online reputation and get a real-time pulse on consumer sentiment, BrandMentions is useful for you! With the tools, you can research and understand what people are saying about you in the market and industry.

The first key feature of the tool is tracking brand mentions across the web and social media in real time. From the data collected, the information you receive can be detected whether mentioned are positive, negative, or neutral, revealing how your brand is perceived. Also, you may also have similar information about your competitors in your industry. Furthermore, the tool also supports generating customizable reports, helping market researchers get more information with just a few specific keywords.

9. Loop11 

For those working in the technology product space, Loop11 can be helpful in understanding and enhancing your user experience. Loop 11's features are mainly aimed at optimizing the website's user experience, identifying problem areas in conversion funnels, or benchmarking against competitors.

To provide you necessary insights, Loop 11 will help you gather information on how users interact with your website, prototype, or even competitors' websites. The tool can create realistic scenarios for users to complete on your site. Beside, to maximize users’ experience, you can use A/B Testing to compare different designs and user journeys. Loop11 also helps market researchers directly listen to users and gather their feedback to make actionable improvements. In short, the features of this app help businesses ensure that their digital product isn't just functional but also easy and enjoyable to use. 

10. Make My Persona

Before performing complex market research, Make My Persona can help you sketch out customer portraits and insights. For building ideal customer personas, Make My Persona is a fantastic starting point, especially for those new to the process. These semi-fictional customer profiles help you better understand your target audience, leading to more effective marketing, sales, and even product development.

Some key features that the application can bring include: offer standardized templates to quickly build buyer personas through a series of questions, share and collaborate to define ideal personas, and allow personalization of personas with specific details relevant to your business.

11. Answer the Public

AnswerThePublic is an excellent tool when you need to dive into the minds of your potential customers. It is ideal if you want to generate content ideas, understand buying intent, and address consumer concerns directly in your marketing.

Answer the Public stands out for its ability to tap into the collective curiosity of internet users, offering marketers and content creators a powerful tool to align their strategies with actual consumer interests. With AnswerThePublic, you can explore the questions and phrases associated with your keywords. Also, the tool can visualize questions by presenting striking formats. You can download raw data or visualizations for further analysis and reporting with export options.

12. Quora

Quora is a massive question-and-answer platform where people seek information and share their expertise across a vast range of topics. It is a valuable supplement to your market research toolkit, best used for qualitative and personalized insights. From a market research perspective, it's a window into consumer sentiment, common pain points, and opinions within your industry.

With Quora, you can search for topics you are interested in using keywords and read posts related to those topics. Information from this source gives you audience insights with diverse, multi-dimensional sharing from the community. Community members can vote on the best answers, ensuring quality content rises to the top. 

13. Buzzsumo

If you're a content marketer, blogger, or entrepreneur who wants to maximize the impact of your content, Buzzsumo is a valuable tool. It helps you understand what works and tailor your content to engage your audience more effectively. 

With Buzzsumo, you can discover high-performing content in your niche, identify audience interests, and craft data-driven content strategies that resonate. Besides, if your business is running a campaign and needs a famous person like a KOL/influencer in the market, Buzzsumo can help you research and identify key influencers for your brand and campaigns. In addition, this site's analytics and insights also help you better understand your competitors as well as exploit new industry trends in communications.

14. Gartner

Gartner is a heavyweight in the market research and advisory space. From Gartner's information, businesses can benefit from navigating industry trends, make informed decisions, and gain a competitive edge.

With in-depth research reports on various industries, you can from there compare your company's performance against industry leaders and identify areas for improvement. In addition, Gartner also provides expert analysis and strategic advice to guide businesses in making strategic moves.

15. Ubersuggest 

One of the market research tools that may be popular with content creators is Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is a dynamic SEO tool designed to provide users with a wealth of keyword insights and content suggestions to enhance website’s search engine rankings.With the tool, you can discover high-potential keywords, analyze competition, and gain valuable insights to fuel your SEO and content marketing strategies.

Not only does it analyze SEO keywords, the tool also helps you estimate cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword to optimize campaign costs. Furthermore, the tool can help you check and analyze competitor websites to understand their backlink profile and identify link-building opportunities.

From Data to Strategy: Essential Market Research Skills

Market research requires going through a long process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market, product or service. Market research will help businesses capture information and exploit insights for the problems they encounter. Therefore, the roles and responsibilities of market researchers require them to possess a lot of knowledge and skills to be able to sustain in this field.

• Quantitative & Qualitative Research: To excel, one must master both quantitative and qualitative research skills—the compass and map that guide strategic decisions.
• Data Collection Techniques & Interpretation: Data collection techniques are your tools for exploration, while data interpretation skills enable you to decipher the terrain’s secrets.
• Statistical Analysis: Data speaks volumes, but not everyone understands its language. Statistical analysis equips you to translate the numbers into actionable insights, revealing patterns, trends, and correlations.
• Survey Design Skills: Crafting a well-designed survey is an art form. You need to ask the right questions, the right way, to avoid bias and elicit reliable, valuable information.
• Networking: In this field, building relationships with industry professionals, attending conferences, and engaging in online communities keeps you at the forefront of trends, opens doors to new opportunities, and fosters valuable collaborations.
• Report Writing & Presentation Skills: Your research findings are only as valuable as their communication. Your report writing and presentation skills help transform data into compelling narratives that resonate with your audience.
• Critical Thinking: Above all, critical thinking is the lens through which researchers read between the lines, discerning not just the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ behind the data.

Conclusion

In your market research journey, the tools and skills discussed can become a great aid to your success. From analytics to the art of inquiry, these capabilities enable you to navigate the complexities of consumer behavior and market trends. For more useful insights, career advice, tips and tricks to help you towards a rewarding career journey - Cake can become a trusted companion. Visit our page to read more articles or create your own Cover Letter, Resume with just a few simple steps.

— Originally Written by Andrea Do —