Market research is a critical component of business success – and in a world where brands are becoming increasingly competitive, understanding the intricacies of your target market is more important than ever. If you skip this step, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money in the wrong places. Fortunately, there are numerous tools, both paid and free, that can assist in streamlining market research efforts by providing key insights about consumers and the industry in general.
Google Trends
It’s one of the best tools for researching market trends and tracking the volume of product or service searches over time and by geographic location. Essentially, the platform provides users with all of the information they require to understand consumer behaviour, gain market insights, and identify market trends. You’ll find almost everything here, from deck-ready data and useful marketing tools to high-level insights to help you prepare for your service or product launch.
How does it work?
When you enter a term into Google Trends, it displays how that term has changed over time and assigns it a score out of 100. You can also compare various terms to see how they stack up against one another. You can narrow your search by the location you’re most interested in, or you can search globally.
Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center (PRC) is a non-profit organisation that conducts research in a variety of fields using interactive and smooth UI charts. The organisation provides transparent, rigorous, and insightful data. The center’s coverage areas include:
- Science
- News and Media
- Public opinion polling
- US politics and policy
- Religion
- Global interest
- Technology and the internet
- Hispanic interest
- Social Media
- IoT(the Internet of Things)
- Online privacy
- Broadband access
Register to gain access to datasets and reports with wonderful charts. Pew does an excellent job of explaining the methodology behind its studies, as well as providing marketing teams with useful demographic breakdowns. Pew data can help you identify new opportunities and gain a better understanding of your target market.
US Census Business Data
The United States Census Bureau is a valuable market research tool. Census Business Builder is a tool for conducting market research in a specific geographic area. The United States Census Bureau also offers Data Gems, a collection of videos that explain how to access census data for your business. Other market research tools available from the US government include:
Economic indicators: See the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis for additional economic figures.
Income statistics: You can find market pay rates and other comparable information. Earnings by Occupation, as well as Statistics on Education and Income
Money statistics: Money statistics from the Federal Reserve Banks can be found here.
NAICS Codes: Look up industries by the North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.
Employment statistics: Various Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Facebook Audience Insight
Facebook Audience Insights is a platform within Facebook designed to provide users with data about two groups: People on Facebook in general and People who connect to your page. With over 2 billion active users per month, you will be doing more harm than good to your marketing efforts if you do not monitor what happens on Facebook.
The insights provided by Facebook Audience will aid in the development and targeting of content, as well as the identification of users who correspond to your target consumers. You will gain a good understanding of:
- Lifestyles; Relationship status and location to figure out people who are interacting with your brand
- What people like; pastimes, interests, hobbies
- Demographic information; Job titles and education, gender, age
Though the market research tool was designed to help marketers more precisely target their advertisements, you can also use it to learn more about your followers and fans even if you are not targeting them. This data can help you improve your overall Facebook marketing strategy by incorporating more insightful competitive research, more compelling content, and stronger purchasing personas.
The information normally comes from these sources;
Self-reported data: This is the information that people provide when filling out their profile information, such as their job title, relationship status, gender, and age.
Third-party data partners: Companies that match information to Facebook’s User ID to obtain information such as purchasing habits, household income, and home value. However, keep in mind that this data is only available to audiences in the United States.
To use this market research tool, go to Facebook Ads Manager and then click on ‘Audience Insights.’
Remesh
Consider a focus group of 1,000-respondents. Does that not sound a little chaotic? Not when AI is added to the equation.
Remesh is a tool that makes it simple to collect qualitative insights that will help shape your marketing strategy. You can have a live conversation with up to 1,000 people at the same time using Remesh, and its clever platform sorts all of that incoming qualitative data for you into simple, easy-to-understand insights.
Hope these tools will help you to grow your business, you just need to consider your goals, the data you’ll need, the advantages and disadvantages of each tool, the costs of performing the analysis, and the costs of evaluating the findings.