20 Market Research Tools for Gathering Actionable Insights

Businesses need data in order to make informed decisions. And one of the best ways to gather said data is through the use of market research tools—panels, survey makers, research centers, and more.

To gather key data for your organization, you might choose to commission your own study, launch a customer feedback survey, or scour the internet for existing data and statistics relevant to your business. No matter which way you go, you need to find the right software

However, there are different types of tools for different needs. So we’ve rounded up the top 20 market research tools companies use to gather actionable insights and make better business decisions.

OvationMR’s market research panel is the perfect tool to enlist when you need to discover specific information about your audience. Our panel consists of a group of vetted individuals who will go through pre-screening to see if they fit the criteria for your survey, helping you gather targeted quantitative or qualitative data.

For example, you can take advantage of our panel to discover information like:

• General public opinions about a certain industry
• What decision makers look for when working with businesses like yours
• Purchasing patterns and behaviors

All of this can help you gather actionable insights that allow you to make informed decisions to grow your business. Get in touch with one of our expert sales reps to start the conversation about your next market research survey.

2. Pew Research Center

Best market research tool for general social research

Pew Research Center is an online resource that allows businesses and individuals to gather free research and data. They regularly conduct surveys, polls, demographic research, and more, putting together reports based on their findings and offering them to the public.

Pew can be a great market research tool for helping your team discover information on politics, media habits, technology, social issues, international affairs, global trends, and more.

Head over to their website to take a look at recent headlines or use the search bar to find data about a specific topic. Find reports, data sets, charts, and other important statistics to help inform your decisions.

3. U.S. Census Business Data

Best market research tool for business and the economy data

The U.S. Census in general can be a great resource for discovering demographics data. However, checking out the U.S. Census’s business data can be a huge help when looking into economic issues.

To help business owners and market researchers get the most out of the Census data, they’ve put together “Data Gems,” or quick video tutorials explaining how to access the data and best interpret it for their needs.

Find data and information on the U.S. labor market, the consumer price index (CPI), money and income statistics, specific industries, and more.

4. Make My Persona

Best market research tool for defining your target audience.

A persona, also regularly referred to as a user persona, buyer persona, or customer persona, is a fictional representation of someone within your target audience. For example you might build a persona around a woman named “Susan,” who’s in her fifties, an HR department head, and helps make decisions on the types of human resources management software her company uses.

Having a customer persona define your target audience (or each facet of your target audience) can help inform a number of business strategies, from marketing and sales to product and development. This free market research tools walks you through the steps to create your own persona so your teams can keep it on hand as they make decisions that could impact the customer.

5. Forsta

Best market research tool for gathering customer experience insights

Forsta is a DIY option for gathering customer experience insights from your target audience. Their software allows users to create surveys, pick from a sample audience, and submit the survey to those individuals, without ever needing to work with a sales rep or client relations manager.

This can be a great option for businesses looking for a smaller-scale, faster DIY option for finding specific data relevant to their audience. Forsta also has their CATI (computer-assisted telephone interviewing) feature that lets teams gather qualitative insights via phone interviews.

Forsta is a software-only option, meaning they’re hands off and it’s up to your team to complete the entire survey and analysis. The software does offer data visualization tools to help teams create charts and graphs based on the data they’ve received.

6. Qualtrics

Best market research tool for experience management

Qualtrics has coined itself an experience management platform, but essentially what that means is it enables businesses to create and deploy surveys and guided projects to discover information about their overall customer, employee, brand, and product experiences.

Similar to Forsta, Qualtrics provides a more DIY approach more so than working with a dedicated account manager. Users can then track survey progress and responses through a dashboard by accessing reports and graphs to visualize the results.

Qualtrics also offers access to market research panels available to help businesses in need reach an audience of pre-qualified survey respondents, for instance, the B2B Audiences we offer here at OvationMR.

7. Alchemer

Best market research tool for creating advanced surveys simply

If you’re looking to run a couple of market research surveys on your own, Alchemer can be a great tool to take advantage of. This tool is meant for enterprise-level companies to create and deploy their own surveys, then collect and analyze the results.

Alchemer is a powerful and flexible survey maker, providing larger organizations with a number of field types and features that smaller-scale survey platforms simply can’t support. However, if you’re a smaller business looking for a more accessible tool, one of the following market research tools might be more up your alley.

8. Typeform

Best market research tool for creating visually appealing surveys and forms

Typeform is another survey maker that is ideal for smaller businesses or less in-depth forms and surveys. Its claim to fame is the tool’s ability to create minimalistic and visually appealing surveys that can be filled in with only a keyboard (though the use of a mouse is also supported).

Typeform offers a number of templates—like this market research survey template—to help small businesses get started with their first round of market research analysis. Businesses can also use Typeform to gather data to put into their customer persona, create customer feedback surveys to embed on their website, and more.

9. Survey Monkey

Best market research tool for creating basic surveys

SurveyMonkey is a bit of a middleman between Typeform and Alchemer. While much more basic than enterprise tool Alchemer, it is also more robust than Typeform. It’s also owned by market research agency Momentive, proving this to be an ideal survey maker for market research usage.

The software even offers its own market research survey template so businesses can quickly and easily get started customizing the questions and sending it out to their target audience.

10. IBM SPSS Statistics

Best market research tool for analyzing data and statistics

IBM SPSS Statistics is a statistical software that enables businesses to read and analyze data and statistics they’ve generated from their own surveys, that live in their databases, or that they’ve downloaded from an archive like Pew Research Center.

Users can import, paste, or type data into the SPSS Statistics reader, then take advantage of the available features to build charts and graphs, test hypotheses, creating reports, and sharing data with other teams and team members.

If you’ve done your own market research through a tool like Forsta, Qualtrics, or Alchemer, you might consider using IBM SPSS Statistics to help read and interpret your data and findings.

11. Displayr

Best market research tool for visualizing and analyzing your data

Displayr is another powerful tool for visualizing your market research results. Easily build out a dashboard with visuals showcasing your results and share it with your team, clients, executives, and more.

Working for businesses of all sizes, Displayr has an entirely free plan for those with smaller data sets to analyze as well as professional and enterprise plans depending on your usage. As their tagline states, Displayr helps businesses build stories out of their data, making sense of the numbers and turning it into something that can drive decision-making.

12. Google Trends

Best free market research tool for monitoring trends in your industry

Google Trends is a great market research tool for discovering trends and seeing what people are talking about online. Type in a query, like a product or feature you’ve been considering launching, to discover interest over time in that keyword as well as where’s it’s talked about most in the world.

This is basic market research, but it can be done quickly when you’re starting to validate an idea to see if people are actually talking about it or not—and where that product might be most effective.

13. BrandMentions

Best free market research tool for finding mentions of your company online

BrandMentions is helpful with your market research for a few reasons. First, it can help you gather sentiment analysis—not only on your own brand, but also on your competitors’. Discover where people are mentioning you and your competitors online and in what tone. Are they happier with your brand or vice versa?

Keeping this information on hand can help inform your marketing and customer support strategies. It can also be useful for reputation management. Furthermore, BrandMentions can be used to track social mentions and hashtags, helping bulk up your overall business intelligence.

14. Think With Google

Best free market research tool for discovering digital  marketing trends and research

Think With Google is a similar archive to Pew Research Center, however their data and research focuses exclusively on the marketing and digital trends industry. Browse the homepage to find latest research articles and reports, or use the search bar to find specific results.

Use this tool to discover insights related to your marketing strategy so you can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to reaching your target audience. The reports and data Think With Google shares is also completely free, making this a great option for discovering digital trends on a budget.

15. Tableau

Best market research tool for business intelligence

Tableau is a business intelligence software that allows users to connect to various data sources and visualize their results. With a number of integrations, like Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and more, Tableau lets users build out comprehensive dashboards with any data they need to interpret.

Your Tableau dashboards are also easily shareable. Tableau provides its users with embed codes, but also has an API that many other companies have used to create integrations, making Tableau embeds part of their native tool.

16. NielsenIQ

Best market research tool for discovering consumer behavior

NielsenIQ is a market research tool that partners with businesses to create surveys related to customer buying behavior and insights. Not only do they publish a number of helpful reports, similar to that of Pew Research Center, they can also work alongside your business to launch your own queries into your specific customer behavior.

NielsenIQ also has its own collection of vetted market research partners that clients of Nielsen can use for various needs. These partners help with a variety of solutions, like customer insights, forecasting, product discovery, and more.

17. Qualaroo

Best market research tool for collecting user feedback

Qualaroo is a market research tool that surveys customers at a very specific point—while they’re already using your website or app. Its ideal use is for gathering customer and user feedback so that you can get actionable insights on how people feel about accessing your site or app.

By seamlessly integrating with your website or app, Qualaroo can help you gauge customer sentiment and how they feel about shopping on your site or utilizing your app. From these results, you can easily pass on feedback to the development team to make immediate changes. Proving that you’re actually listening to customer feedback is one of the most powerful things you can do.

18. Statista

Best market research tool for gathering data and statistics

Statista is a massive database filled with all sorts of data and statistics, most of which is tied up into easy-to-understand charts and graphs. While Statista does offer a large amount of its data for free, the tool also locks certain reports behind a premium paywall.

Start by searching the database for statistics relevant to your business, product/service, or industry to see how much data you can access before deciding whether or not it’s worth it to subscribe to the premium plan.

19. Buzzsumo

Best market research tool for discovering content ideas

Buzzsumo is a market research tool specific to content and social media marketing teams. This tool analyzes top-performing content across the internet, helping users discover key terms and topics that are popular.

This tool is a great option for informing your content marketing strategy and ensuring you’re covering topics that your target audience is actually going to have interest in and find useful. The tool allows users to access a free trial to test it out before diving into the paid subscription.

20. Loop11

Best market research tool for gathering user experience feedback.

 Loop11 is a usability testing market research tool, allowing companies to gather real-time feedback from actual people who are testing out their website or app to see how it works. This will help you discover how usable your website is to someone who has never accessed it before, as well as see how a typical person would navigate it so you can make it as easy as possible.

Gather insights on how you can improve the overall usability of your app or website, then ship them directly to development so they can get started implementing changes.

 Find the Right Market Research Tools for Your Needs

Our list of market research tools can help guide you through nearly every aspect of market research:

• building out a customer persona,
• creating surveys,
• finding respondents,
• analyzing data, and more.

For a done-for-you approach, rather than a do-it-yourself platform, contact us at OvationMR. Our seasoned experts can help you decide the best data for your needs, build out a comprehensive survey, put it in front of pre-qualified respondents, and work with you every step of the way.