how to do market research on google

How to Use Google Trends for Market Research (2024)

Whether you’re starting a business or launching a product, conducting market research is critical.

That’s why some companies spend millions of dollars on market research every year.

The good news?

You don’t have to spend a fortune on market research. In fact, with Google Trends , you can do it for free.

In this piece, you’ll learn 7 practical ways to use Google Trends for market research.

1. Analyze Competitors

What is the search growth related to competitor brands?

You can use Google Trends to compare the search growth of your competitor brands or products. You can even get an idea of what products are trending through related queries and topics.

For example, here are some of those pet supply companies from before.

You can see competitor products that are generating interest.

2. Research Consumer Sentiment

How do people feel about a particular topic, product, or brand? One of the cool things about Google Trends is that you can analyze queries that measure sentiment.

For example, you can search “should I buy a Tesla” and “is Tesla worth the money.” Or maybe “Tesla competitors” would help provide insight into future market share.

You can also analyze general market confidence.

Here are the “Interest Rate” results, which may indicate a heightened concern about the rising rates.

“Should I sell my house,” can suggest sentiment about housing prices.

And “debt consolidation” might suggest growing financial concerns.

3. Explore Trending Topics

You can use Google Trends to check out which topics are trending. Select a category you’re interested in and let Google show you trending topics.

For example, let’s say you’re researching the beauty industry. You can check out the “Beauty & Fitness” category and view the trend growth at the category level over time (and by region).

Some categories have related subcategories. For example, from “Beauty & Fitness,” you can drill down to the “Cosmetic Procedures” category.

Now, check out the related topics and queries. It looks noisy, but you can already notice interesting trending topics.

By default, the filters at the top of the “Search Topics” and “Search Queries” show “Rising” items. You can change it to “Top” to see items with more consistent growth.

Exploring a topic will lead to even more related topics and queries.

Once you have some topics, you can analyze their search growth. For example, here is a comparison between two beauty brands, “Sol de Janeiro” and “Rare Beauty.”

You can check out the breakdown by region.

You can even see how it trends across metro areas and cities.

And find even more queries.

4. Analyze Product Demand

How does search growth reflect consumer demand?

With Google Trends you can hone in on trending products and analyze their demand over time.

For example, here’s a trending beauty product: “Rare Beauty Liquid Touch Weightless Foundation”.

You can see a recent uptick in search growth. Try changing the date range to look at the last 12 months.

You can also see which regions are driving growth.

Let’s try another example.

Let’s say you own a pet products store, and you’ve started to hear more and more about dog probiotics. You can validate product interest with Google Trends.

In the last five years, interest has been trending upward, with the highest growth in Oregon, Arizona, and Colorado.

In the queries and topics sections, you can see the same brands appearing.

You can explore these related topics and queries to find more products or brands to analyze.

5. Monitor Geographical Trends

You can monitor geographical trends to see where demand is coming from.

Let’s search for “Protein Ice Cream.” To see where it’s trending.

Here is another example: “Fly Fishing.”

You can drill down to the metro area and city to get a more granular picture.

6. Observe Seasonal Trends

Google Trends is great at catching seasonal patterns in search growth.

For example, let's examine the seasonal search growth of “running shoes.”

The term peaks in March, April, and May - right in the Spring, the ideal season for running.

Where the weather is more moderate, the spikes are less drastic. For example, in Nebraska, where the winters are harsh, there is a more pronounced spike in demand during the spring.

Hawaii has less seasonal fluctuation.

Here are the results for “Traeger,” a popular grill. Notice that search growth consistently spikes around big holiday meals like Thanksgiving and before the 4th of July.

7. Enhance Google Trends

Google Trends offers many great ways to perform market research. Considering it’s free, it’s a powerful tool that leverages the most extensive search database on earth.

But you can take your market research even further by combining it with Exploding Topics .

Exploding Topics scans and crawls millions of websites, social media feeds, ecommerce searches, and conversations to surface growing trends. Then, we vet trends through our team of experts.

Like Google Trends, Exploding Topics can help you perform deep market research.

(But we take it a few steps further.)

Market Research Without the Leg Work

With Exploding Topics, we show you where the demand is. Head over to our Trend Database, select a category, and see what’s “Exploding” or “Peaked.”

Pro members get access to curated reports and weekly newsletters with commentary from our trend experts.

Deeper Trend Analysis with Meta Trends

With Exploding Topics Pro , you get data-packed deep dives into the macro trends driving product growth.

Discover The Rising Stars

Investors and market researchers can explore our library of “Trending Startups,” where you can filter by category, see funding information, and track interest over time.

More Control With a Flexible API

Google Trends doesn’t have an API . But we have you covered. Use our flexible REST API to retrieve topic data we find in real-time.

• Build your own application to get topic growth volume by the hour or minute.
• Quickly share reports and Exploding Topic findings with your team members
• Enable workflows or notifications when we find an “Exploding” topic.

Market Research can be challenging if you don’t have the right tools to do it. Google Trends is a great free tool that is easy to use and can quickly lead you in the right direction.

When used with Exploding Topics, you can take your Market Research a step further - discovering more trends and more insights from more sources.

So, get out there and start discovering.

Find Thousands of Trending Topics With Our Platform

How to use Google Trends for Market Research (2022)

Market research is incredibly important for businesses of all sizes. Unfortunately, many of the market research methods can be expensive and extremely time-consuming. Thanks to the widespread usage of the internet, market research tools have become more accessible to all businesses. In this article, we will focus on how to use Google Trends for market research.  

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free tool developed by Google that shows users how often different search terms are entered into Google’s search engine compared to total search volumes over chosen time periods.

Google Trends gives users the possibility to analyze search term popularity over time, explore similar keywords and compare how popular a search term is in different regions of the world. Google Trends can also be used to discover spikes in keyword search volumes which are usually triggered by real-world events.

Here are 4 methods on how to use Google Trends of market research.

1. Use Google Trends to find popular topics in your industry

Google Trends can help you discover popular topics you might have missed in your industry. Here’s how you can find popular topics and search queries in your industry.

Go to   trends.google.com

Step 1 : Navigate to  Explore .

Step 2:  Select the  Region  you want to explore. You can focus on a whole country, state or a city – possibilities are endless here.

Step 3:  Choose the  time range  you want to research. If you want to see more overarching topics of your industry, choose a longer time frame and if you want to discover newer topics or queries, choose a lesser time frame.

Step 4:  Choose your  category . For example, if you work in marketing, you might choose the Advertising & Marketing category.

Step 5:  Explore  topics  and  search queries . You might find completely unrelated things, especially within the  Rising  category. It’s just showing what people interested in your chosen category are also searching for.

2. Use Google Trends to determine seasonal patterns

Do you want to find out what kind of seasonality occurs in your industry to better plan advertising activities? Google Trends is a great tool to help with that, here’s how you do it.

Let’s say you sell boots. Common sense tells us that boots would be more popular in autumn and winter seasons and less popular in spring and summer. Let’s use Google Trends to confirm our thesis.

Step 1:  Enter your  search term . Make sure you don’t choose a topic, because topics and search terms are measured differently.

Step 2:  Analyze results and change variables according to your needs.

For example, if we view the popularity of the search term “boots” over the past 12 months, we might want to see, if the same trends have been there for a longer period.

Example 1: Past 12 months.

Example 2: Past 5 years.

As you can (expectedly) see, our assumption was confirmed by the data from Google Trends.

Step 3: Compare  results. Let’s see how the search term “boots” compares to something we would deem opposite, for example, keyword “sandals”.

As we can see, the search term “sandals” raises in popularity towards summer and decreases as the winter season approaches.

What we can also see from this comparison is, that even at the lowest point the search term “boots” is more popular than the search term “sandals” at it’s highest. From this, we can deduct, that in the United States, boots are a more popular search term than sandals over the whole year. These statistics could differ if we would focus on a selected region of the United States.

Another example we could use is comparing 2 products: Apple iPhone 8 and Samsung Galaxy S8.

From this, we can deduct, that the launch of the iPhone 8 had sparked more than double the interest in the United States than the launch of Samsung Galaxy S8. As new products have been coming out, the popularity of these products has been in a downward trend.

You can use these same principles to find patterns of seasonality in your industry. This data can be useful when you are making your marketing plan.

3. Use Google Trends for Competitor Research

Google Trends can also be used to identify popular search terms and topics for your competitors. For example, you can view what kind of search terms are popular for your competitor at this moment or which ones were trending a year ago.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1:  Enter the  competitor’s name . Let’s use Apple for this example.

Step 2:  Set your  region  and  time range .

To view information from the past, navigate to the  custom time range .

Next, select the  time range  you want to view. For this example, we chose 2/2/16 to 3/2/16.

Step 3:  Review popular search terms, topics and trends.

We can see which things were popular for our competitor in the past and compare them to the present day. For example, search terms “apple store” and “apple watch” are still among the top searched terms at the beginning of 2020. In contrast, the Apple encryption dispute topic isn’t relevant anymore.

Idea:  You can analyze different seasons for your competitor to discover if they have similar year-to-year offers, which you can anticipate and perhaps respond to.

Which leads us to:

4. Use Google Trends to discover patterns

Finding patterns can be extremely useful when planning your advertising and promotional activities. Knowing when the volume for a certain search term tends to increase or decrease can help you to anticipate results from your marketing activities.

Step 1:  Enter your  keyword . For this example, we have chosen the keyword “marketing”.

Step 2:  Select your  region .

Step 3:  Start analyzing different  time ranges .

• Daily patterns  (View: Custom time range > Past week)

Can you discover any popularity patterns that happen daily?

For this, use the  Custom time range > Past week  and go through each day. Unfortunately, Google Trends doesn’t allow to go further beyond the past week with hourly data so you will have to perform this analysis over a period to solidify your findings.

• Weekly patterns  (View: Past 30 days, custom time range)

Scan your keyword for weekly patterns. Is a drop-off occuring often in the search volume? In this example, search volume for the keyword “marketing” descends during weekends.

• Monthly patterns  (View: Custom time range > 1/1/__ to 1/1/__)

Identifying monthly patterns also goes hand-in-hand with discovering seasonal patterns. With our keyword we can see slight dips during the beginning of summer and larger downward trend at the christmas time.

• Yearly patterns  (View: 2004 – present)

Looking at the data from 2004 to present, we can see that the volume for the search term “marketing” has descended during the years. We can also identify, that the search volume for this keyword has sudden drops every december (Christmas period).

Google Trends can be a very helpful tool for doing market research. Being able to anticipate certain trends is an invaluable skill in business and marketing.

In this article we learned how to:

• Use Google Trends to find popular topics in your industry
• Use Google Trends to determine seasonal patterns
• Use Google Trends for Competitor Research
• Use Google Trends to discover patterns

We hope you found this article useful. If you have any ideas for improvement or just want to share something, please let us know in the comment section

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How to do market research: The complete guide for your brand

Written by by Jacqueline Zote

Published on  April 13, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

Blindly putting out content or products and hoping for the best is a thing of the past. Not only is it a waste of time and energy, but you’re wasting valuable marketing dollars in the process. Now you have a wealth of tools and data at your disposal, allowing you to develop data-driven marketing strategies . That’s where market research comes in, allowing you to uncover valuable insights to inform your business decisions.

Conducting market research not only helps you better understand how to sell to customers but also stand out from your competition. In this guide, we break down everything you need to know about market research and how doing your homework can help you grow your business.

Table of contents:

What is market research?

Why is market research important, types of market research, where to conduct market research.

• Steps for conducting market research
• Tools to use for market research

Market research is the process of gathering information surrounding your business opportunities. It identifies key information to better understand your audience. This includes insights related to customer personas and even trends shaping your industry.

Taking time out of your schedule to conduct research is crucial for your brand health. Here are some of the key benefits of market research:

Understand your customers’ motivations and pain points

Most marketers are out of touch with what their customers want. Moreover, these marketers are missing key information on what products their audience wants to buy.

Simply put, you can’t run a business if you don’t know what motivates your customers.

And spoiler alert: Your customers’ wants and needs change. Your customers’ behaviors today might be night and day from what they were a few years ago.

Market research holds the key to understanding your customers better. It helps you uncover their key pain points and motivations and understand how they shape their interests and behavior.

Figure out how to position your brand

Positioning is becoming increasingly important as more and more brands enter the marketplace. Market research enables you to spot opportunities to define yourself against your competitors.

Maybe you’re able to emphasize a lower price point. Perhaps your product has a feature that’s one of a kind. Finding those opportunities goes hand in hand with researching your market.

Maintain a strong pulse on your industry at large

Today’s marketing world evolves at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with.

Fresh products. Up-and-coming brands. New marketing tools. Consumers get bombarded with sales messages from all angles. This can be confusing and overwhelming.

By monitoring market trends, you can figure out the best tactics for reaching your target audience.

Not everyone conducts market research for the same reason. While some may want to understand their audience better, others may want to see how their competitors are doing. As such, there are different types of market research you can conduct depending on your goal.

Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions. This helps the conversation to flow naturally, making it easier to add context. Whether this takes place in person or virtually, it enables you to gather more in-depth qualitative data.

Buyer persona research

Buyer persona research lets you take a closer look at the people who make up your target audience. You can discover the needs, challenges and pain points of each buyer persona to understand what they need from your business. This will then allow you to craft products or campaigns to resonate better with each persona.

Pricing research

In this type of research, brands compare similar products or services with a particular focus on pricing. They look at how much those products or services typically sell for so they can get more competitive with their pricing strategy.

Competitive analysis research

Competitor analysis gives you a realistic understanding of where you stand in the market and how your competitors are doing. You can use this analysis to find out what’s working in your industry and which competitors to watch out for. It even gives you an idea of how well those competitors are meeting consumer needs.

Depending on the competitor analysis tool you use, you can get as granular as you need with your research. For instance, Sprout Social lets you analyze your competitors’ social strategies. You can see what types of content they’re posting and even benchmark your growth against theirs.

Brand awareness research

Conducting brand awareness research allows you to assess your brand’s standing in the market. It tells you how well-known your brand is among your target audience and what they associate with it. This can help you gauge people’s sentiments toward your brand and whether you need to rebrand or reposition.

If you don’t know where to start with your research, you’re in the right place.

There’s no shortage of market research methods out there. In this section, we’ve highlighted research channels for small and big businesses alike.

Considering that Google sees a staggering 8.5 billion searches each day, there’s perhaps no better place to start.

A quick Google search is a potential goldmine for all sorts of questions to kick off your market research. Who’s ranking for keywords related to your industry? Which products and pieces of content are the hottest right now? Who’s running ads related to your business?

For example, Google Product Listing Ads can help highlight all of the above for B2C brands.

The same applies to B2B brands looking to keep tabs on who’s running industry-related ads and ranking for keyword terms too.

There’s no denying that email represents both an aggressive and effective marketing channel for marketers today. Case in point, 44% of online shoppers consider email as the most influential channel in their buying decisions.

Looking through industry and competitor emails is a brilliant way to learn more about your market. For example, what types of offers and deals are your competitors running? How often are they sending emails?

Email is also invaluable for gathering information directly from your customers. This survey message from Asana is a great example of how to pick your customers’ brains to figure out how you can improve your quality of service.

Industry journals, reports and blogs

Don’t neglect the importance of big-picture market research when it comes to tactics and marketing channels to explore. Look to marketing resources such as reports and blogs as well as industry journals

Keeping your ear to the ground on new trends and technologies is a smart move for any business. Sites such as Statista, Marketing Charts, AdWeek and Emarketer are treasure troves of up-to-date data and news for marketers.

And of course, there’s the  Sprout Insights blog . And invaluable resources like The Sprout Social Index™  can keep you updated on the latest social trends.

Social media

If you want to learn more about your target market, look no further than social media. Social offers a place to discover what your customers want to see in future products or which brands are killin’ it. In fact, social media is become more important for businesses than ever with the level of data available.

It represents a massive repository of real-time data and insights that are instantly accessible. Brand monitoring and social listening are effective ways to conduct social media research . You can even be more direct with your approach. Ask questions directly or even poll your audience to understand their needs and preferences.

The 5 steps for how to do market research

Now that we’ve covered the why and where, it’s time to get into the practical aspects of market research. Here are five essential steps on how to do market research effectively.

Step 1: Identify your research topic

First off, what are you researching about? What do you want to find out? Narrow down on a specific research topic so you can start with a clear idea of what to look for.

For example, you may want to learn more about how well your product features are satisfying the needs of existing users. This might potentially lead to feature updates and improvements. Or it might even result in new feature introductions.

Similarly, your research topic may be related to your product or service launch or customer experience. Or you may want to conduct research for an upcoming marketing campaign.

Step 2: Choose a buyer persona to engage

If you’re planning to focus your research on a specific type of audience, decide which buyer persona you want to engage. This persona group will serve as a representative sample of your target audience.

Engaging a specific group of audience lets you streamline your research efforts. As such, it can be a much more effective and organized approach than researching thousands (if not millions) of individuals.

You may be directing your research toward existing users of your product. To get even more granular, you may want to focus on users who have been familiar with the product for at least a year, for example.

Step 3: Start collecting data

The next step is one of the most critical as it involves collecting the data you need for your research. Before you begin, make sure you’ve chosen the right research methods that will uncover the type of data you need. This largely depends on your research topic and goals.

Remember that you don’t necessarily have to stick to one research method. You may use a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. So for example, you could use interviews to supplement the data from your surveys. Or you may stick to insights from your social listening efforts.

To keep things consistent, let’s look at this in the context of the example from earlier. Perhaps you can send out a survey to your existing users asking them a bunch of questions. This might include questions like which features they use the most and how often they use them. You can get them to choose an answer from one to five and collect quantitative data.

Plus, for qualitative insights, you could even include a few open-ended questions with the option to write their answers. For instance, you might ask them if there’s any improvement they wish to see in your product.

Step 4: Analyze results

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to analyze it keeping your research topic in mind. This involves trying to interpret the data to look for a wider meaning, particularly in relation to your research goal.

So let’s say a large percentage of responses were four or five in the satisfaction rating. This means your existing users are mostly satisfied with your current product features. On the other hand, if the responses were mostly ones and twos, you may look for opportunities to improve. The responses to your open-ended questions can give you further context as to why people are disappointed.

Step 5: Make decisions for your business

Now it’s time to take your findings and turn them into actionable insights for your business. In this final step, you need to decide how you want to move forward with your new market insight.

What did you find in your research that would require action? How can you put those findings to good use?

The market research tools you should be using

To wrap things up, let’s talk about the various tools available to conduct speedy, in-depth market research. These tools are essential for conducting market research faster and more efficiently.

Social listening and analytics

Social analytics tools like Sprout can help you keep track of engagement across social media. This goes beyond your own engagement data but also includes that of your competitors. Considering how quickly social media moves, using a third-party analytics tool is ideal. It allows you to make sense of your social data at a glance and ensure that you’re never missing out on important trends.

Email marketing research tools

Keeping track of brand emails is a good idea for any brand looking to stand out in its audience’s inbox.

Tools such as MailCharts ,  Really Good Emails  and  Milled  can show you how different brands run their email campaigns.

Meanwhile, tools like  Owletter  allow you to monitor metrics such as frequency and send-timing. These metrics can help you understand email marketing strategies among competing brands.

Content marketing research

If you’re looking to conduct research on content marketing, tools such as  BuzzSumo  can be of great help. This tool shows you the top-performing industry content based on keywords. Here you can see relevant industry sites and influencers as well as which brands in your industry are scoring the most buzz. It shows you exactly which pieces of content are ranking well in terms of engagements and shares and on which social networks.

SEO and keyword tracking

Monitoring industry keywords is a great way to uncover competitors. It can also help you discover opportunities to advertise your products via organic search. Tools such as  Ahrefs  provide a comprehensive keyword report to help you see how your search efforts stack up against the competition.

Competitor comparison template

For the sake of organizing your market research, consider creating a competitive matrix. The idea is to highlight how you stack up side-by-side against others in your market. Use a  social media competitive analysis template  to track your competitors’ social presence. That way, you can easily compare tactics, messaging and performance. Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses next to your competitors, you’ll find opportunities as well.

Customer persona creator

Finally, customer personas represent a place where all of your market research comes together. You’d need to create a profile of your ideal customer that you can easily refer to. Tools like  Xtensio  can help in outlining your customer motivations and demographics as you zero in on your target market.

Build a solid market research strategy

Having a deeper understanding of the market gives you leverage in a sea of competitors. Use the steps and market research tools we shared above to build an effective market research strategy.

But keep in mind that the accuracy of your research findings depends on the quality of data collected. Turn to Sprout’s social media analytics tools to uncover heaps of high-quality data across social networks.

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How to Use Google Trends for Market Research: A Guide

Introduction to Google Trends for Market Research

Whether it’s the latest tech gadget or a sudden spike in interest in a forgotten fashion trend, knowing what grabs people’s attention can be invaluable for any business. Enter Google Trends, a free tool that turns the massive amount of searches on Google into understandable insights about what’s trending. If you’re curious about how to use Google Trends for market research, you’re in the right place.

This guide explores the potential of Google Trends as a market research tool, demonstrating how businesses can leverage it to refine their marketing strategies and understand their audience on a deeper level.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a tool offered by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries across various regions and languages. The platform provides an invaluable glimpse into the search behavior of users around the globe, presenting data in an easy-to-understand format.

For starters, Google Trends showcases trends in search volume over time, allowing users to pinpoint when a particular term spiked in popularity or started to decline. This temporal aspect is crucial for identifying seasonal variations, emerging trends, or fading interests.

In addition to temporal trends, Google Trends provides geographical distribution data, highlighting where in the world specific searches are more popular. This can help businesses understand regional variations in interest for products or topics, enabling more targeted marketing strategies.

Lastly, Google Trends offers insights into related queries, which are terms that users searching for one topic also searched for. This feature is particularly useful for understanding the broader context of search interest and uncovering related topics or products that might be of interest to your target audience.

How to Use Google Trends for Market Research

Leveraging Google Trends for market research involves a series of actionable steps designed to provide insights into consumer behavior, industry trends, and competitive landscapes. Here’s a breakdown of how to use Google Trends to inform your market research efforts effectively.

Identifying Trending Topics and Keywords

To effectively use Google Trends for identifying trending topics and keywords, start by inputting broad terms related to your industry into the search bar and observe the related queries and topics that emerge. This can help you pinpoint more specific areas of interest within your niche, revealing what your target audience is actively searching for. Pay attention to the “Related topics” and “Related queries” sections, as these can uncover additional keywords and topics that are gaining traction. 

Additionally, monitoring these trends over time allows you to adapt your strategy as consumer interests evolve. For businesses, staying ahead of these changes can mean the difference between capturing the market’s attention and being left behind. Integrating trending keywords into your SEO strategy, social media posts, and content marketing efforts can enhance your visibility and attract more traffic to your site. Moreover, understanding these trends enables you to tailor your product development and offerings to meet the market’s current needs, potentially opening up new avenues for growth and engagement.

Analyzing Seasonal Trends and Consumer Interest

Seasonal trends play a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior, and Google Trends offers a clear window into these fluctuations. Analyzing search data for specific terms over the past years lets you identify patterns that indicate when interest in certain products or topics peaks. This insight is invaluable for planning your marketing calendar. For example, if you’re in the retail industry, understanding the timing of spikes in searches for “holiday gifts” can inform the launch of your holiday marketing campaigns, ensuring they go live when consumers are most receptive.

Leveraging this information can also guide inventory management, promotional offers, and content creation. By preparing for periods of heightened interest, businesses can ensure they’re fully stocked and ready to meet consumer demand. Furthermore, creating content that’s tailored to seasonal interests or concerns can help attract more visitors to your site during these key times. For instance, a gardening supply company might produce content focused on spring planting tips as searches for gardening information begin to rise in late winter. 

Comparing Market Interest Between Products

Google Trends’ comparative analysis feature is a powerful tool for businesses looking to gauge market interest between different products or services. Entering multiple search terms into the tool allows you to see how search interest varies between them over time, providing a visual representation of consumer preference trends. This comparison can be particularly useful in competitive analysis, helping you understand where your products stand in relation to others in the market. It can highlight opportunities for differentiation and help you identify areas where there’s a strong interest but less competition.

This feature can also aid in making strategic decisions about product development and marketing focus. For example, if you’re considering launching a new product line, comparing the search interest of related products can give you an idea of the potential market demand. It can also reveal shifts in consumer preferences, allowing you to pivot your strategy to better align with current trends. For businesses, this means more informed decision-making, ensuring that resources are allocated to products and marketing efforts that are most likely to resonate with their target audience.

Geographical Market Analysis

Next, understanding the geographical distribution of interest in specific topics or products is crucial for tailoring your marketing efforts to different regions. Google Trends provides detailed data on where searches are most concentrated, offering insights into regional preferences and behaviors. This information can inform localization strategies, ensuring that your marketing messages are relevant to the specific concerns and interests of consumers in different areas. For businesses operating in multiple regions or considering expansion, this geographical analysis can identify promising markets and guide targeted advertising and content strategies.

Moreover, geographical insights from Google Trends can enhance the effectiveness of local SEO efforts and regional marketing campaigns. By identifying areas with high interest in your products or services, you can optimize your online presence for those regions, improving visibility and attracting more qualified leads. For instance, a restaurant chain might use this data to create region-specific promotions or tailor its menu offerings to reflect local tastes. 

Predicting Market Movements

Using Google Trends to predict future market movements involves analyzing historical data and current trends to forecast changes in consumer behavior. By examining how similar trends have evolved in the past, businesses can make educated guesses about future developments, positioning themselves to respond proactively. This forward-looking approach is invaluable for staying ahead of market shifts, allowing businesses to adjust their strategies in anticipation of changing consumer interests. Whether it’s introducing new products, pivoting marketing messages, or adjusting inventory levels, being able to predict market movements can give businesses a competitive edge .

Furthermore, keeping an eye on steadily rising trends or sudden spikes in search interest can signal emerging opportunities or upcoming challenges. Businesses that can quickly capitalize on these insights—whether by being the first to market with a new product, ramping up content production on a hot topic, or adjusting pricing strategies in response to growing interest—can significantly enhance their market position. Predictive analysis with Google Trends is about turning insights into action, leveraging the tool’s vast data to make smarter, more strategic decisions that drive success in an ever-changing market.

Taking Action with Google Trends

Incorporating Google Trends into your market research toolkit can transform how you approach business strategy, content creation, product development, and marketing campaigns. By leveraging the real-time data and comprehensive insights provided by Google Trends, businesses can make informed decisions that are rooted in actual consumer behavior and search trends. This not only enhances the relevance and effectiveness of your efforts but also ensures that your resources are invested in initiatives that truly resonate with your target audience.

Now that you understand how to use Google Trends for market research, it’s time to start incorporating these insights into your business’s strategic planning. Dive into the data, explore the patterns, and let the trends guide your next moves. With Google Trends as your compass, navigating the complexities of the digital marketplace becomes a data-driven journey, leading to more targeted strategies, better customer engagement, and, ultimately, greater business success.

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How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry. The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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Market Research: What It Is and How to Do It

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In other words, it’s the process of understanding who your business is targeting so you can better position your marketing strategy.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The role of market research in a marketing strategy
• When to conduct market research

Types of market research

• Market research methods and their benefits
• How to conduct market research (example included)
• Market research tools and resources

What is the role of market research in a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy is a business’s overall game plan for reaching consumers and turning them into customers.

The key word in the above definition is “game plan”. Entering a market with a product is like starting a new game. Since you’re new to the game, you don’t know the rules, and you don’t know who you’re playing against.

This is exactly where market research comes in . Market research allows you to discover the rules of the marketing game by understanding your target audience. Moreover, it allows you to understand who your opponent is by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

Research is what marketing pros do to plan their moves, and outperform their competition.  It’s also what marketing pros use to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own marketing strategy .

But is market research the ultimate business oracle? Unfortunately no. Even companies that specialize in market research admit it - here’s a quote from one of them :

(…) it cannot be assumed that market research is an exact science, as it would be unrealistic and unreasonable to expect market researchers to predict the precise demand for a new concept, given that there are numerous variables that can impact demand outside of the market researchers’ remit.

That’s why market research with all of its significance is “only” a part of marketing, and it’s “only” an experiment.  It’s up to you whether you will conduct your experiment, and when you will end it.

For example, Crystal Pepsi seemed very promising in the market research phase, yet it failed when released onto the market (a similar thing happened to New Coke). Xerox’s idea for a commercial photocopier was a no-go in the eyes of research analysts; Xerox did it anyway, and the rest is history.

When should you conduct market research?

Paul N. Hauge and Peter Jackson in their book “Do Your Own Market Research” point to three specific situations when market research is really useful:

• Setting goals . Knowing things like the size of the market, or defining your potential customers can help you set your sales goals.
• Problem-solving . Low sales? Low profitability? Market research will help you understand whether your problems are internal, like a low-quality product, or external, like aggressive competition.
• Supporting company growth.  Understanding how and why consumers decide on products will help you decide what products to introduce to the market.

Another answer to the “when” is the importance of the decision that you need to make. The more important the marketing issue you’re tackling, the more market research comes in handy.

For example, launching a new car on the market is quite a big event, right? So maybe Ford could have avoided losing 350 million dollars with the Ford Edsel if they had done their research properly. I mean, with the right methods in place it shouldn’t be that hard to predict that consumers will deem the car overpriced and ugly.

That said, market research doesn’t always have to be a large, complex project. The relatively new trend of agile market research  allows you to research the market regularly and in a cost-effective way. This is where you employ bite-size, iterative, and evolutionary methods to react to fast-changing circumstances and adapt to unknown market territories.

Furthermore, if you’re working in startup conditions, especially if you’re developing an innovative product, you may be interested in customer development . In this methodology market research is at its “agilest” and it’s tightly woven into the product development process.

Take Ahrefs for example. We stick to agile market research hacks anyone can use. As you will see later in the article, we use simple (but effective!) stuff like social media polls, crowdsourcing, in-house competitive analysis, or just tracking the pricing of our competitors.

Case in point, just recently we asked our fellow marketers on Twitter how they go about researching the market. It seems that market research comes in all shapes and sizes:

Have you ever performed “market research?“ What was it for? — Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) May 3, 2021

Just because somebody does market research in a certain way doesn’t mean that you need to copy that. You should know your options, and they start with the different types of market research.

Primary research

Whenever the research is done by you or on your behalf, and you need to create the data to solve a given problem, that is called primary market research.

Examples:  Focus groups, interviews, surveys (more on those later in the article).

Key benefits: It’s specific to your brand and products or services, and you can control the quality of the data.

Secondary research

Whenever you’re using already existing data, such as that put together by other businesses and organizations, you’re doing secondary market research.

Examples: Second-party and third-party sources like articles, whitepapers, reports, industry statistics, already collected internal data.

Key benefits: Get a macro perspective of your marketplace, as secondary research includes other players in the market, and most probably utilizes a bigger set of data than your primary sources.

Primary research vs. secondary research

Primary and secondary market research are different but by no means opposite. It’s actually recommended to use both.

While primary sources will give you a focused, micro perspective of your business, secondary research will tell you how other businesses are doing and how your research findings compare to bigger research sample sizes. 

Market research subtypes

A bit more theory for all you marketing geeks out there. Professional market researchers distinguish between the following primary and secondary market research subtypes:

• Qualitative research.  Think interviews, open-ended questions, results expressed in words rather than numbers and graphs. This type of research is used to understand underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations.
• Quantitative research. Think surveys, polls, usually closed-ended questions, results expressed in numbers and statistics. This type of research is used to test or confirm hypotheses or assumptions by quantifying defined variables (such as opinions or behaviours) and generalizing results from larger data samples.

Overview of market research methods

Let’s go over some popular market research methods you can use yourself and/or outsource.

Internal data analysis

The data you’ve already collected in your company is an invaluable secondary research data source. The more time you’re in the business, the more data you have on your hands.

The best thing about your internal data is that it’s been put into practice in real-life market conditions, so you just need to find the patterns and draw conclusions.

Here are some internal data sources you can leverage :

• Website data (like Google Analytics)
• Past campaigns performance data
• Internal interviews with employees

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions and are great for exploratory qualitative research.

In unstructured interviews, you have an informal, free-flowing conversation on a given set of topics.

In structured interviews, you prepare a detailed, rigorous interview protocol where you list every question you want to ask and you can’t divert from them.

You can also choose the “middle way” with semi-structured interviews which revolve around predefined themes or questions, but allow for open-ended discussion.

A word of advice here would be to always remain neutral and unbiased, even during unstructured interviews. Also, it’s helpful to perform a pilot test of the interview to quickly spot some defects of your protocol.

Recording the interview may influence the answers, so use it wisely.

Focus groups

Focus groups are where 5 to 10 people with common characteristics take part in an interactive discussion with a moderator. They’re used to learn how a particular group thinks about a given issue or to provide feedback on a product.

Now, you might know that Steve Jobs famously hated focus groups. He’s on record saying:

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

If you’re trying to create a leapfrog product like the iPhone, there’s probably some validity to this statement. But most of us aren’t wrestling with that level of ambition. We just want to know if customers will like a proposed new feature or not. For this, focus groups are super useful.

Surveys involve polling your audience. They’re usually performed online for customer satisfaction and loyalty research, and are one of the most popular and cost-effective market research methods.

Some of the tried and tested use cases of online surveys  are:

• Product feature desirability
• User satisfaction feedback
• Quantitative analysis of certain issue occurrences
• Identifying friction points in your customer journey
• Discovering the reasons to convert to or cancel your service
• During product onboarding to create a customer profile (and for marketing automation)
• Opinion about a recently made change

An interesting example of surveying the market is crowdsourcing . That’s what Ahrefs does to understand what features to build, how important they are, and what customers expect from them.

What’s unique about crowdsourcing is that it allows the users to add their own ideas, and upvote or comment on existing ideas rather than answer predetermined questions, so this method leaves less room for marketing myopia. You improve your business, and the users get a better product—everybody wins.

How we crowdsource ideas at Ahrefs

Social media is another great place to survey the marketplace.

How many of you have disavowed links in GSC this year? — Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 8, 2020

Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the practice of categorizing a market into homogeneous groups based on specific criteria, also called segmentation variables (like age, sex, company size, country, etc.).

If you think you’re building a product for everyone, think again. Not everyone will want to buy from you.

Smart companies pick their target audience carefully. They pinpoint groups of people or organizations that could be valuable customers for the business. That way they also discover their non-ideal customers and develop a plan to attract customer segments gradually. 

Ever wondered why Procter and Gamble creates so many, often competing, brands? You guessed it: market segmentation. P&G simply divides and conquers. Different people have different needs, so they need different products (and possibly brands).

Competitive analysis

Another powerful, yet often overlooked, market research method is the process of understanding one’s market environment. Seriously, if there’s only one thing you could do to learn what works and what doesn’t in your market, you should do a competitive analysis.

“Whenever we discuss building a certain feature, we would definitely research our competitors and see how they do it.” Tim Soulo, CMO

You’d be surprised by how much you can learn about and from your competition and how much of it can be done online. There are certain tried and tested techniques, hacks, and tools for this type of research, and you can find them in this guide .

Analyze commercial data

Secondary market research data is relatively affordable, fast to acquire, and easy to use. Think market reports, industry insights, and a ton of research data someone has already gathered and analyzed so you don’t have to.

The most reputable sources are Gartner , Forrester , and Pew . Apart from those, make sure to check if there is a trustworthy commercial data source specific to your niche.

Sites like G2, Capterra and Trust Pilot also count. Not only do they give you an overview of your industry, but you can also find some real gems in your users’ reviews and your competitors’ reviews as well. Ahrefs uses that data source regularly internally and externally, like for this section of our Ahrefs vs Semrush vs Moz  landing page:

Benefits of market research - a comparison

Let’s quickly summarize the above 7 different methods of market research by their key benefits.

How to do market research process in 5 key steps

So now we know what market research is, why and when to do it, and we’ve learned about all of the important types and methods.

Let’s see how we can use that knowledge to conduct any type of market research in 5 steps.  As an example of market research, I’ll tell you about some of my past experiences with a 3D printing company.

• Identify the market research problem
• Choose the sample and research method
• Collect the data
• Analyze the data
• Interpret and present conclusions

1. Identify the market research problem

This is where every research project starts. You will also find that market research, in general, follows the pattern of the scientific method . First, you need to establish what exactly you are researching.

Do you have a question about your business you want to answer? Maybe you see an opportunity in the market. Or maybe you’ve observed something curious about your product use and you have a hypothesis that you want to validate? State that in the first step of the market research process.

Let me share an example.

In the past, I ran marketing for a few companies, and one of them was a 3D printer manufacturer. Early on I stumbled upon two problems with that company.

First: one of our market segments was saturated with similar products of similar quality at significantly lower price (classic, right?). Second: more and more 3D printing manufacturers seemed to be drifting away from the hobby segment to tackle the professional segments with more expensive products, yet we remained in the hobby/DIY niche. So we were too expensive for hobbyists but too hobbyist for customers who could afford us.

The hypothesis that I wanted to verify was that if the marketplace was showing a trend towards more professional use cases of 3D printing, our company should follow that trend. In other words, I wanted to check the viability of shifting the brand positioning into the professional/premium sector.

2. Choose the sample and research method

We’ve already covered the main types and methods of market research. You should already have a good idea of the differences between primary and secondary research, or whether qualitative or quantitative methods would best suit your needs.

As for the sample of your research, this refers to the portion of the entire data source in question that you will use. For example, if you want to run a survey among your customers, the sample will refer to the selection of customers you will include in your survey. There are a few options for choosing a sample:

• Use the entire data source . Obviously, it’s not a sample per se. Nevertheless, if sending a survey to all of your customers is doable (and reasonable), this is a perfectly good choice.
• Choose a random sample. Systematic sampling is the easiest way to choose a random sample. This is where you select every x/nth individual for the sample, where x is the population, n is the sample. For example, if you want a sample size of 100 from a population of 1000, select every 1000/100 = 10th member of the population.
• Convenience sampling: choose respondents available and willing to take part in the survey.
• Purposive sampling: choose respondents that in your judgement will be representative or possess some other feature that is important to the research.
• Quota sampling:  choose some arbitrary quota of respondents, e.g. 10 non-paying customers, 10 paying small companies and 10 paying large companies.

Back to our example. As a method for verifying my hypotheses, I chose a mix of:

• Surveys sent to all of our resellers.  We wanted to see if they also had seen a paradigm shift in the market and what segment of clients they had encountered the most. We also wanted to know their perspective on the longevity of that trend, and whether they potentially be interested in a more premium version of our product.
• In-depth interviews  on the phone with our resellers conducted by our sales team. We used purposive sampling here. Our sample comprised resellers with which we had the best relations (we knew they would be more eager to share).
• Competitive analysis.  We were mostly interested in market players who tried to penetrate the professional/industrial segment, so this was our sample ( purposive sampling ). We were interested in stuff like: what features were they building into their 3D printers, what was their brand positioning, what was their pricing, what language they used to communicate with their target audience, etc.
• Wohler’s industry report, anything 3D printing from Gartner and the like, reports by 3D printing services providers, and basically any scrape of serious data we could find ( convenience sampling ).
• Internal data:  customer satisfaction issues, and just general current customer profile based on Google Analytics and Facebook data.

3. Collect the data

Once you’ve got your problem, method, and sample nailed, all you need to do is to gather the data. This is the step where you send out your surveys, conduct your interviews, or reach out for industry insights.

A word of advice, choose your market research tool carefully; it will greatly influence the amount of work you will have with analyzing the data. For example, Google Forms  automatically makes graphs out of quantifiable data (plus it’s free).

Here’s the data we collected for the 3D printing company:

• Reseller survey data (both quantitative and qualitative data).
• Reseller interview data (qualitative data).
• Customer satisfaction issues (qualitative data gathered through all customer support channels, we analysed about 200 issues and requests).
• Competitive analysis data (from about 10 competitors).
• We managed to gather 3 comprehensive, independent industry reports, a few smaller reports made by other 3D printing companies, and dozens of scrapes of data, like statistics and noteworthy insights. We pulled out data like: 3D printer manufacturer market share, market growth in time, market segmentation, key 3D printing applications, 3D printing adoption by region, key players’ sales numbers.
• Any demographic, sociographic and psychographic data on customers and website visitors we could find in our internal data.

4. Analyze the data

Now that you have your data collected, the next step is to look for patterns, trends, concepts, or often repeated words—all dependent on whether your method was qualitative or quantitative (or both).

Simple research performed on a small sample will be relatively easy to analyze, or even analyzed automatically, like with the aforementioned Google Forms. Sometimes you will have to use expensive and harder to master software like Tableau , NVivo , PowerBI , or SPSS . Or you can use Python or R for data analysis (if you have a data analyst or data scientist on board, you’re in luck).

Continuing the example: Google Forms made it easy for us to spot patterns in surveys since quantitative data was calculated automatically. The most time-consuming part was reading through all of the responses and manually looking for patterns (back then I wasn’t aware of any tool that could do the job). Both sales and marketing teams worked on analyzing some of the qualitative data to have more than one reference point.

When it comes to researching the competition, coming up with some kind of data structure makes the work more comprehensive (and saner). We put our competitors’ data in specific categories, like products & services (prices included), target market, benefits, values, and brand message. We also used something called a brand positioning map which looks like this:

Analyzing secondary data was probably the easiest part, as the data we needed was already prepared in ready-to-use graphs, statistics and insights. We just had to sift through the contents to look for answers to our questions.

5. Interpret and present conclusions

Analyzing the data is not enough. You need to compile your data in a communicative, actionable way for the decision makers. A good practice is to include in your report: all your information, a description of your research process, the results, conclusions, and recommended actions.

Summing up my 3D printing example, I hypothesised that our market was experiencing a major shift and that the company should follow that trend. The research we did verified that hypothesis positively:

• Our resellers were getting more and more inquiries about professional/industrial use cases and machines. As you can imagine, the budget of this kind of client was significantly higher than hobbyists but so were the expectations.
• Our resellers indicated that this phenomenon is here to stay. Moreover, they declared interest in a new 3D printer tailored to the needs of their more demanding clientele.
• Our customers were outgrowing their early-adopter habits and wanted something easier to use, something plug-and-play that just worked reliably. Tinkering with the printer was something only hardcore makers were interested in.
• The companies we were interested in had already started adapting to the professional/premium market both with their offer and smart marketing communication.
• We also found a ton of other interesting data that we used later on. For example, we found that apart from engineers and designers, an equally interesting segment was educational institutions.

Our initial market research lasted for about two months. We also came back to it whenever we had the chance (or the necessity) and reiterated it to see if we were on the right track.

Was it worth it? Let me tell you this: it saved the company. Our research showed us that this was the last call to reposition the brand and the product. Our original target segment was being gradually dominated by companies we couldn’t compete with.

It took us some time to get buy-in from key stakeholders and implement the conclusions throughout the whole company (eventually, we got it right). As a result, we increased sales, increased customer satisfaction and put ourselves on a more profitable growth track—a win-win for everyone. We even went as far as merging with another manufacturer to shorten the time to get to that sweet market spot.

Looking back, no one from our close competitors survived. They didn’t adapt as we did, and we owed everything to market research.

Whatever you do, avoid these common market research mistakes :

• Poor sampling.
• Ambiguous questions.
• Leading or loaded questions (questions that show bias or contain controversial assumptions).
• Unclear or too many research objectives.
• Mixing correlation with causation.
• Ignoring competitive analysis.
• Allowing biases to influence your research ( confirmation bias  being arguably the most common and the most dangerous one).
• Not tracking data on a regular basis.

Online market research tools and resources

Market research reaches back to the 1930s and it’s probably rooted even “deeper” than the 20th century. Everything you could do then you can do now better, faster and cheaper thanks to these online tools and resources.

SEO tools - research the market with Ahrefs

I’ve put together 3 quick wins that can help with your market research—and that’s only a taste of what you can do with Ahrefs.

1. Brand awareness

In the early 20th century, you’d have to hire market researchers to spend days or even weeks asking people “have you heard about brand X”. Today, you can simply look up the search volume for that brand.

So let’s say you run a drone manufacturing brand, and you want to check out your competitors’ brand awareness in France. Go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer , input the names of the brands, select “France” as your market, and in a flash you get:

The branded keyword volume indicates the brand awareness of that brand in a particular market. You can also keep track of that data by performing this search regularly to see if there are significant changes over time (for example, impacted by a recent campaign).

2. Feature demand

The next game-changing feature for electric cars will concern batteries, charging time, and charging cost (and not autopilot). How do I know?

Well, I opened Ahrefs Keywords Explorer , typed in “electric cars”, and went to the Questions report to find out what people search for. This gave me an idea of what problems electric car owners have (and potential owners worry about). You can easily perform similar research for your niche.

3. Understand the language of your market

Gerald Zaltman in his popular book “How Customers Think” proposes the idea that one of the major erroneous assumptions of marketing is that consumers think in words.

On the other hand, when consumers Google something they have to think in words. And when we market to those consumers we have to think in words as well. The question is: which words?

Let’s say that you want to enter a new and innovative market in the USA, for example the synthetic fermentation-derived dairy industry, also called animal-free dairy.

To you, this set of words “animal-free dairy” may be the very center of your business and marketing efforts. But let’s see what other people think. Let’s use Keywords Explorer  to see how many people search Google in the U.S. just for that phrase:

Whoops! Looks like your product category has disappointingly low awareness. Does this mean you’re doomed? Not necessarily. 

Let’s try other words. Words that mean something different, but still closely related to your new product.

Now we’re onto something. People search for “vegan dairy” and “lactose free dairy” more often. Not the same, but closely related. Yet, look at the difference in search volume.

Words make a huge difference.  And Google knows that.

The only reason you were able to put all of those three phrases in the same bucket was that you knew the connection between those words. The problem is that your target audience may not know that connection; they may not even know that this kind of product exists. This quick analysis of search volume shows that you may want to make that connection, for example with content marketing .

If you create content around related higher volume keywords, you can potentially get more organic traffic than simply focusing on the keyword designating your product category.  Look, even though you might believe the main benefit of your animal-free product is something unrelated to lactose, e.g., cruelty-free production, you might want to address the problem of lactose intolerance to appeal to people with this condition.

But that’s not all. You may have noticed “low lactose cheese” in the bottom right corner. This refers to the nifty feature of Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer called “Parent topic”. Parent topic indicates that Google sees a given keyword as part of a broader topic.

If we click on this Parent topic, we uncover even more search demand:

We can see that the search for the topic “low lactose cheese” exceeds the “vegan dairy” topic by almost 300% in the US. Also, uncovering that parent topic gave us 879 potential keyword ideas (some of them have even higher search volume, like “lactose free cheese”).

Want to discover even more topic associations? No problem. You can dive deeper into this research by using other features of Ahrefs’ Keyword explorer. For example,the  Also rank for  report allows you to see which other keywords (and topics) the top 100 ranking pages for your target keyword also rank for.

This market research quick-win ties into the broader topic of keyword research. If you want to uncover even more keyword ideas and learn how to analyze them, read  our keyword research guide .

Source: https://hubspot.com

Customer Relationship Management software is used to manage and track interactions between a company and its customers and prospects. Usually, it works in tandem with sales or marketing automation software (or has integrations for them). If used properly, it is a true cornucopia of market insight.

As I pointed out earlier, it’s one of those primary data sources that you can leverage to discover patterns in your customer behaviour or characteristics. Popular choices are Hubspot, Salesforce, Intercom, but there is a ton of CRM software out there, so check out a software comparison like G2  to see what best suits your needs.

User feedback tools

This type of tool allows you to carry out our aforementioned survey research method online.

Create targeted, user-specific surveys and analyze answers with tools like Google Forms , SurveyMonkey , Typeform , or Qualaroo .  

Sending out your typical email with a survey is not the only option, for example with Qualaroo you can display surveys:

• In your digital product
• In your SaaS product
• Inside your web app
• Inside your mobile app
• On your website
• On your mobile site
• On your prototypes.
• On most public URLs. Even competitor sites

Need more? No problem, check out SurveyMonkey’s Market Research solution . It taps into the agile market research models we’ve discussed. They’ve got 14 online solutions that help you stay on top of your game, including customer segmentation, monitoring market dynamics, brand, creative analysis, feature importance, finding the right price for your products, and more.

So you think you have a tough business challenge? This daring gentleman is trying to disrupt… eggs. Extremely hard, but doable with market research on his side.

Website/app analytics

Tracking your website or app traffic is absolute marketing basics. Just look at some data dimensions Google Analytics offers:

• Demographics

Sounds familiar? Yup, that sounds like good ol’ market segmentation. Here’s the best part: it’s free, quick to perform and it’s based on your primary data.

If you’ve never dug deeper into Google Analytics, or similar analytics software (e.g., Matomo , Woopra ) here are some questions that this marketing technology can answer for you: 

• What do people search for once they’re on my site?
• What differentiates customers who have made a purchase from the ones that haven’t?
• What are my top countries by revenue?
• What are my best selling products?

If you’re already using Google Analytics, see if you’re not making these Google Analytics tracking mistakes. 

User experience research tools

Commonly used by UX designers, but just listen to the value propositions of these tools:

• “See and hear real people using your website, online shop or app.” ( https://userpeek.com/ )
• “Real-time feedback. From real customers. Wherever you work. So you can create experiences that get real results.” ( https://www.usertesting.com/ )
• “Scalable & Customized User Research” ( https://www.userlytics.com/ )
• “Record video and audio of your users, so you see and hear their exact experience with your product.” ( https://www.loop11.com/ )

Again, sounds much like our market research methods, right? And it’s no joke, thousands of companies use these tools.

User experience research tools allow you to get user feedback and insights on your products, prototypes, websites, and apps.

Testing is based on tasks your test-takers perform. You can either use your own user base or define a custom base using their services. You’ll get written reports and even recorded videos that you can incorporate into your market research and make sure you’re properly taking advantage of that market opportunity.

Ad planning tools

That’s right—the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter ad planner you already use for running ads can give you some insight into the numbers behind the market segments you’re interested in.

30+ males with higher education interested in technology gadgets? No problem. Female C-suite decision-makers from Europe? It’s all there.

Census data

The availability of this kind of data may vary based on your target market. For example, in the US the Census Bureau  offers a free resource for searching the country’s census data. You can filter the data by topics, years, geography, surveys, or industry codes. You can also access premade interactive tables (which you can also download) or simply explore certain regions of the country using their maps.

Business intelligence tools

With business intelligence tools like Tableau , Looker or Sisense , you can connect to any data source to perform data cleaning, statistical operations, and data visualization. They are designed to allow you to glean insights into your data, and communicate effectively with your stakeholders. It’s like SQL combined with R, but you don’t need coding skills and you get a user-friendly interface.

Because these tools are overflowing with functionality and because they are usually pricey, they are overkill for small companies with basic market research needs. Often you will find that the tool that you are already using for your research method comes with some data analysis and visualization functions. And if not, you can always import your data to Excel or Google Docs and use Google Data Studio for a shareable interactive presentation.

Other noteworthy tools and services

• Think with Google
• Living Facts

Final thoughts

Market research is no easy feat. If you feel intimidated by it, you’re not the only one. But don’t shy away from it. The benefits of conducting even sporadic market research can have benefits for your business you simply can’t ignore. You won’t turn into a market research pro overnight, but the good news is you don’t have to. You can go the agile way (like Ahrefs), use affordable self-service online tools and resources, or you can even outsource your research. As long as you base your marketing game plan on valid data, you dramatically improve your chances for success.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter .

A Complete Guide to Market Research: Methods, Templates, How to do it and a lot more

Johnny Tong

Jan 19, 2021

Table of Contents

What is Market Research?

Why is market research so important, market research methods, focus groups, observation, types of market research, market segmentation, brand awareness and reach, pricing research, how to do market research, market research report & analysis templates, swot analysis template, market survey template, 15 common and effective market survey questions, demographic questions, psychographic questions, questions about your product/service., 10 best market research software.

• 1. Surveybot
• 2. Google analytics
• 3. Question Pro
• 4. Make My Persona
• 5. SurveyMonkey

Dos and Don’ts of Market Research

Do focus on your purpose, do use multiple tools, do make necessary changes according to the reports, do use user-friendly survey, do define a budget, don’t stop doing it again, don’t rely on internet information alone, don’t go for professional respondents, market research faqs.

• What is market research?
• Why is market research so important?
• Types of market research
• How to do market research?
• 5 best market research software
• Dos and don’ts of market research
• Market research FAQs

• Keep a definite purpose
• Identify the target audience
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Study your industry
• Prepare survey questions
• Record and analyze your findings

• How old are you?
• What is your gender?
• What is your employment status?
• What do you do?
• What are your hobbies, interests, attitudes?
• What are your challenges, goals?
• How satisfied are you with our product?
• Would you recommend our product to a friend?
• How appealing is our website/store?
• Do you think our prices are high?
• How satisfied are you with our customer service?
• Was it easy to find the right product from our store/website?
• How did you know about our product?
• What attracted you to our brand?
• How often do you come across our advertisements online?

1.  Surveybot

2.  google analytics, 3.  question pro, 4.  make my persona, 5.  surveymonkey.

• How long will it take to carry out market research?
• How to choose the best market research software for my business?
• How many questions should be there in my survey?
• Can I trust the research results to make business decisions?

Chief Human @ Surveybot

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Market research is a cornerstone of all successful, strategic businesses. It can also be daunting for entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup or start a side hustle . What is market research, anyway? And how do you…do it?

We’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about the market research process so that by the end of this guide, you’ll be an expert in market research too. And what’s more important: you’ll have actionable steps you can take to start collecting your own market research.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach market research, including primary and secondary research and qualitative and quantitative research. The strongest approaches will include a combination of all four.

“Virtually every business can benefit from conducting some market research,” says Niles Koenigsberg of Real FiG Advertising + Marketing . “Market research can help you piece together your [business’s] strengths and weaknesses, along with your prospective opportunities, so that you can understand where your unique differentiators may lie.” Well-honed market research will help your brand stand out from the competition and help you see what you need to do to lead the market. It can also do so much more.

The Purposes of Market Research

Why do market research? It can help you…

• Pinpoint your target market, create buyer personas, and develop a more holistic understanding of your customer base and market.
• Understand current market conditions to evaluate risks and anticipate how your product or service will perform.
• Validate a concept prior to launch.
• Identify gaps in the market that your competitors have created or overlooked.
• Solve problems that have been left unresolved by the existing product/brand offerings.
• Identify opportunities and solutions for new products or services.
• Develop killer marketing strategies .

What Are the Benefits of Market Research?

Strong market research can help your business in many ways. It can…

• Strengthen your market position.
• Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
• Help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Minimize risk.
• Center your customers’ experience from the get-go.
• Help you create a dynamic strategy based on market conditions and customer needs/demands.

What Are the Basic Methods of Market Research?

The basic methods of market research include surveys, personal interviews, customer observation, and the review of secondary research. In addition to these basic methods, a forward-thinking market research approach incorporates data from the digital landscape like social media analysis, SEO research, gathering feedback via forums, and more. Throughout this guide, we will cover each of the methods commonly used in market research to give you a comprehensive overview.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary and secondary are the two main types of market research you can do. The latter relies on research conducted by others. Primary research, on the other hand, refers to the fact-finding efforts you conduct on your own.

This approach is limited, however. It’s likely that the research objectives of these secondary data points differ from your own, and it can be difficult to confirm the veracity of their findings.

Primary Market Research

Primary research is more labor intensive, but it generally yields data that is exponentially more actionable. It can be conducted through interviews, surveys, online research, and your own data collection. Every new business should engage in primary market research prior to launch. It will help you validate that your idea has traction, and it will give you the information you need to help minimize financial risk.

You can hire an agency to conduct this research on your behalf. This brings the benefit of expertise, as you’ll likely work with a market research analyst. The downside is that hiring an agency can be expensive—too expensive for many burgeoning entrepreneurs. That brings us to the second approach. You can also do the market research yourself, which substantially reduces the financial burden of starting a new business .

Secondary Market Research

Secondary research includes resources like government databases and industry-specific data and publications. It can be beneficial to start your market research with secondary sources because it’s widely available and often free-to-access. This information will help you gain a broad overview of the market conditions for your new business.

Identify Your Goals and Your Audience

Before you begin conducting interviews or sending out surveys, you need to set your market research goals. At the end of your market research process, you want to have a clear idea of who your target market is—including demographic information like age, gender, and where they live—but you also want to start with a rough idea of who your audience might be and what you’re trying to achieve with market research.

You can pinpoint your objectives by asking yourself a series of guiding questions:

• What are you hoping to discover through your research?
• Who are you hoping to serve better because of your findings?
• What do you think your market is?
• Who are your competitors?
• Are you testing the reception of a new product category or do you want to see if your product or service solves the problem left by a current gap in the market?
• Are you just…testing the waters to get a sense of how people would react to a new brand?

Once you’ve narrowed down the “what” of your market research goals, you’re ready to move onto how you can best achieve them. Think of it like algebra. Many math problems start with “solve for x.” Once you know what you’re looking for, you can get to work trying to find it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to solve a problem when you know you’re looking for “x” than if you were to say “I’m gonna throw some numbers out there and see if I find a variable.”

How to Do Market Research

This guide outlines every component of a comprehensive market research effort. Take into consideration the goals you have established for your market research, as they will influence which of these elements you’ll want to include in your market research strategy.

Secondary Data

Secondary data allows you to utilize pre-existing data to garner a sense of market conditions and opportunities. You can rely on published market studies, white papers, and public competitive information to start your market research journey.

Secondary data, while useful, is limited and cannot substitute your own primary data. It’s best used for quantitative data that can provide background to your more specific inquiries.

Find Your Customers Online

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can use online gathering spaces and forums to gain insights and give yourself a competitive advantage. Rebecca McCusker of The Creative Content Shop recommends internet recon as a vital tool for gaining a sense of customer needs and sentiment. “Read their posts and comments on forums, YouTube video comments, Facebook group [comments], and even Amazon/Goodreads book comments to get in their heads and see what people are saying.”

If you’re interested in engaging with your target demographic online, there are some general rules you should follow. First, secure the consent of any group moderators to ensure that you are acting within the group guidelines. Failure to do so could result in your eviction from the group.

Not all comments have the same research value. “Focus on the comments and posts with the most comments and highest engagement,” says McCusker. These high-engagement posts can give you a sense of what is already connecting and gaining traction within the group.

Social media can also be a great avenue for finding interview subjects. “LinkedIn is very useful if your [target customer] has a very specific job or works in a very specific industry or sector. It’s amazing the amount of people that will be willing to help,” explains Miguel González, a marketing executive at Dealers League . “My advice here is BE BRAVE, go to LinkedIn, or even to people you know and ask them, do quick interviews and ask real people that belong to that market and segment and get your buyer persona information first hand.”

Market research interviews can provide direct feedback on your brand, product, or service and give you a better understanding of consumer pain points and interests.

When organizing your market research interviews, you want to pay special attention to the sample group you’re selecting, as it will directly impact the information you receive. According to Tanya Zhang, the co-founder of Nimble Made , you want to first determine whether you want to choose a representative sample—for example, interviewing people who match each of the buyer persona/customer profiles you’ve developed—or a random sample.

“A sampling of your usual persona styles, for example, can validate details that you’ve already established about your product, while a random sampling may [help you] discover a new way people may use your product,” Zhang says.

Market Surveys

Market surveys solicit customer inclinations regarding your potential product or service through a series of open-ended questions. This direct outreach to your target audience can provide information on your customers’ preferences, attitudes, buying potential, and more.

Every expert we asked voiced unanimous support for market surveys as a powerful tool for market research. With the advent of various survey tools with accessible pricing—or free use—it’s never been easier to assemble, disseminate, and gather market surveys. While it should also be noted that surveys shouldn’t replace customer interviews , they can be used to supplement customer interviews to give you feedback from a broader audience.

Who to Include in Market Surveys

• Current customers
• Past customers
• Your existing audience (such as social media/newsletter audiences)

Example Questions to Include in Market Surveys

While the exact questions will vary for each business, here are some common, helpful questions that you may want to consider for your market survey. Demographic Questions: the questions that help you understand, demographically, who your target customers are:

• “What is your age?”
• “Where do you live?”
• “What is your gender identity?”
• “What is your household income?”
• “What is your household size?”
• “What do you do for a living?”
• “What is your highest level of education?”

Product-Based Questions: Whether you’re seeking feedback for an existing brand or an entirely new one, these questions will help you get a sense of how people feel about your business, product, or service:

• “How well does/would our product/service meet your needs?”
• “How does our product/service compare to similar products/services that you use?”
• “How long have you been a customer?” or “What is the likelihood that you would be a customer of our brand?

Personal/Informative Questions: the deeper questions that help you understand how your audience thinks and what they care about.

• “What are your biggest challenges?”
• “What’s most important to you?”
• “What do you do for fun (hobbies, interests, activities)?”
• “Where do you seek new information when researching a new product?”
• “How do you like to make purchases?”
• “What is your preferred method for interacting with a brand?”

Survey Tools

Online survey tools make it easy to distribute surveys and collect responses. The best part is that there are many free tools available. If you’re making your own online survey, you may want to consider SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a breakdown of how your business stacks up against the competition. There are many different ways to conduct this analysis. One of the most popular methods is a SWOT analysis, which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” This type of analysis is helpful because it gives you a more robust understanding of why a customer might choose a competitor over your business. Seeing how you stack up against the competition can give you the direction you need to carve out your place as a market leader.

Social Media Analysis

Social media has fundamentally changed the market research landscape, making it easier than ever to engage with a wide swath of consumers. Follow your current or potential competitors on social media to see what they’re posting and how their audience is engaging with it. Social media can also give you a lower cost opportunity for testing different messaging and brand positioning.

SEO Analysis and Opportunities

SEO analysis can help you identify the digital competition for getting the word out about your brand, product, or service. You won’t want to overlook this valuable information. Search listening tools offer a novel approach to understanding the market and generating the content strategy that will drive business. Tools like Google Trends and Awario can streamline this process.

Ready to Kick Your Business Into High Gear?

Now that you’ve completed the guide to market research you know you’re ready to put on your researcher hat to give your business the best start. Still not sure how actually… launch the thing? Our free mini-course can run you through the essentials for starting your side hustle .

About Mary Kate Miller

Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.

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How to Use Google Trends to Perform Market Research

Are you looking to do some market research but have a limited budget? Traditional market research techniques can be costly and are often unfeasible for small businesses. Google Trends is a free and easily accessible tool that anyone can use.

Google Trends is a tool that finds trending topics based on Google Searches. It can help you discover what your target audience is searching for online and analyze information to provide insight into your customers. Here are three ways you can use Google Trends to perform market research.

1. Find Product Features That Are Important to Your Audience

Here’s how you can use Google Trends to determine what product features your target audience in BC tends to search for.

1. Click on Explore in-Depth .

2. Select Locations and set it to British Columbia.

3. Go to Search Terms , click All Categories , select your industry, and choose the appropriate sub-category.

For instance, if you own an accounting firm, select Finance as your industry and Accounting & Auditing as your sub-category.

Once you have selected the proper location and subcategory, you’ll see which search terms are popular within that industry. For example, you may notice that the top search queries for this category are terms such as tax return and child tax.

This information can help you make decisions about online marketing. Using the above example, you may write a blog post about child tax benefits or create targeted ads offering advice to those whose benefits have been suspended, cancelled, or reduced.

2. Identify Consumer Demand

You can also use Google Trends to determine which brand or features have greater consumer demand.

For example, if you’re an electronic retailer, you can enter “Smart TV” and “LED TV” in Google Trends to find out which terms gain popularity over time and by region.

Google Trends can compare brands, like Samsung and Sony, to see which is more popular.

These insights can help you make more informed business decisions. For example, if there are more searches for 32-inch Samsung TVs, you may want to stock more of them. Or, if the 42-inch TVs are not selling, run a promotion that targets people who search for 32-inch TVs with ads that offer great discounts for the larger size. This will attract the attention of more buyers who may not think they can afford a 42-inch TV and show them a promotion that could make it feasible.

3. Determine What Consumers Are Searching for in Competing Brands

Enter a competitor’s name in the Topic section and discover search queries related to the brand.

For example, if you’re a local coffee shop, you can enter Starbucks, Blenz Coffee, and Waves Coffee House.

Then, you’ll be able to see trends in the data. For example, if you notice users searching for “Starbucks nutrition” or “Starbucks calories,” you might find it helpful to highlight the nutritional facts of your products. Consider featuring that information on your menu, pamphlet, or website now that you know your audience finds it valuable.

Identifying Trends and Generating Sales

Google Trends has allowed small businesses to gather consumer information without spending money on focus groups or surveys. By using this tool to research competing brands, products, and top queries within a specific industry, you can discover what is in demand by your target audience. You can then use this information to improve your products and marketing, capture customers’ attention and generate sales.

Market Research helps to remove the guesswork from business decisions. Make sure to download Small Business BC’s Market Research Checklist for more information.

How Small Business BC Can Help Your Business

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3 ways to do market research with Google

• August 9, 2022

Most entrepreneurs I know haven’t done any market research. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t know how. For whatever reason, market research intimidates people. Or, it just bores them.

Maybe it’s because the very idea of it conjures up images of surveys, focus groups, and painfully boring PowerPoint presentations. It’s also just not as fun as other parts of a business. Coders like to code. Marketers like to work on automation. You know, all the sexy stuff. The ironic thing is, market research actually influences both the code written and the marketing tactics used!

Well, I have good news for you. Market research is not only easy, it’s fun! Especially if you know how to do it. And we will do it with the world’s most popular research tool: Google .

Even if you don’t use Google for personal use, it’s a great tool given the immense amount of data.

Google also happens to have plenty of options available to you for researching your market, all of which you have at least heard of, if not used at some point.

But the point of this article is not to overwhelm you, so don’t worry. We will keep things easy. I think keeping it easy is important because the beginning is where most people get stuck with market research. At first, they don’t know how to do it, then they dig deeper and realize that there are a ton of really advanced strategies for getting actionable insights. There are just too many options, and folks get nervous about picking only one.

Choosing just one option is better than none, and I am going to give you three simple methods you can use today with Google that will go a long way in your near-term and long-term market research. Because that’s the thing: market research never ends . It’s part of your strategy to be competitive!

So, let’s jump into it, starting with a tool that you’ve undoubtedly heard of in the past, but perhaps forgot about.

Google Alerts

Such a simple tool, yet often underutilized.

Google Alerts is a great way to “set it and forget it” when it comes to keeping an eye on your market. Rather than having to do research every day, it just “taps you on the shoulder” whenever something is happening. And the reach is far & wide, including any of these areas:

Let’s run through an example of using Google Alerts for market research. In this hypothetical, we will use “help desk software” for the industry. I happen to know of a newer option called Thrivedesk , and they are entering a packed market. Not impossible, but more work than some other industries, that’s for sure.

So, first thing I would do is to create an alert for my own brand. This way, I would be aware when anyone mentions my company. The parameters would look something like this:

I would use the same parameters for my next alerts, specifically my competitors. This is where you need to choose wisely. Obviously, there are some major players in the space, but that doesn’t necessarily make all of them a competitor. I would make a similar alert for Freshdesk and Help Scout . Then I’d look to see who else is making a run at these big players. After just a little research, I found Groove . Their approach to the market is slightly different, and they look more nimble. It’d be good to keep tabs on them.

The great thing about Google Alerts for market research purposes is that it will keep an eye out for mentions of not only brand names (companies), but also any industry. You could make an alert for “help desk software”, for example. This way, if a topic pops up on Reddit or Twitter, you’ll be in the know and can jump in!

Google Trends

I like Google Trends for two reasons:

• You can get a quick, high-level overview of the market.
• You can get ideas for content creation.

All you have to do is enter in your desired industry term or company name. For instance, I put in “help desk software” and can see that the interest over time is rather consistent. That’s good!

Aside from that, you should glance at the Related queries section to get an idea of related searches people are making related to the topic. This is a great way to get some insight into possible content marketing themes (blog posts, for example).

The nice thing about that section is that it’s not overwhelmingly huge. You can see we only have eight queries available (for the past 12 months) that Google classifies as “Rising”. That makes them good candidates for your content strategy, since they are in demand.

Google Trends is a nifty tool for getting high-level analysis of your market. It’s worth checking in on it every now and again to see if there are any shifts with your competitors or the industry.

Google Search

No kidding, right? But hear me out. There is actually a little trick for using Google search for market research.

There is a certain search term that will give you a ton of great resources to look into further when it comes to researching your market. Specifically, we want to know which other options are considered “big players”, and which are “newcomers” into the space.

How do we do this? By searching Product Name +alternative .

Perhaps you have done this before in your daily life, but have you done it for your own industry or product? I like this search because it will give you:

• Listicles – You know, the articles that list out all the various popular options available. If you’re not on the list, reach out to the author! Read through the article and find out how each option is being described. You can easily spot who is competing on price versus value, and which segment of the market they occupy.
• Reviews – This one I absolutely love, since reviews can be an absolute goldmine for how you build your brand positioning strategy .

You can get creative with the “alternative” search as well. For instance, I like to also add Reddit into the search, since I have found Reddit to be a place of unfiltered opinions. So, you would Google Product Name +reddit , or even Product Name +alternative + reddit . I did my own search on the latter and got results like this:

Some really great information in there! Just out of curiosity, I clicked on one and found this interesting post:

Why was this interesting? Well, I noticed several locations where Gorgias was mentioned. Prior to this exercise, I had never heard of that company, but on Reddit it has some big fans! If it were me, I would research this company a bit more to see how they position their offering. Their pricing looks to be high (based on the comments), so maybe it’s possible to extract what people like about them and package it at a more accessible price!

Then, you can reply to these threads and offer up your solution as a “more affordable Gorgias” option. Be careful not to come off spammy though, just be transparent about it. I would say something like:

I saw many people raving about Gorgias and had a look. All I can say is “wow”, they really do have a great offering! But I agree with you on the price piece. I run a help desk software startup as well, and we decided to add in XYZ feature from Gorgias since people like it so much. Perhaps it would work for you? Let me know what you think.

See how market research can turn into customer outreach! And that’s the name of the game: getting (and speaking) to your potential customers based on what it is they actually want.

One final note about Google Searches: don’t stop on the first page . Everyone stops after one, maybe two pages, of search results. Don’t. There is plenty of gold to be found on pages three, four, and five!

This exercise is not a “one and done” activity. Your market is constantly evolving, so you need to always be on top of it.

Look, I get it. Market research is time-consuming and not the most exciting part of business. Most people just do it once before they launch and call it quits. Yet, that’s just the beginning!

As you compete in a market, you learn more about it. You start to gain a better understanding about how quick it moves, the players involved, and the competitive advantages enjoyed by each company.

This is when things get really fun because now your market research can quickly turn into market strategy. Done right, that can result in more money for your business!

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Inside Google Marketing: Applying a Research Mentality to Measurement

Without a doubt, big data and metrics are on the minds of marketers. Yet, few consider applying research rigor to their optimization and measurement plan. Google Media Lab's Tommy Wiles offers four steps to help marketers apply both scientific research and experimentation methods to campaigns.

One of my most hated classes in undergrad was Research Methods. I was drilled on the basics of the scientific method and the difference between causation and correlation, and I was schooled on endless research types (for example, longitudinal vs. cross-sectional studies and pre- vs. post-testing).

Now, as a marketer, I realize just how valuable this required class was. I may not remember organic compounds all that well, or how to take an integral, but my basic knowledge of the scientific method and the benefits of running rigorous experiments has proven extremely useful.

When it comes to measuring marketing campaigns, research methods are often overlooked. However, at Google Media Lab (the in-house team responsible for planning, buying, and placing media for Google), we believe the incorporation of a thorough research process can make the difference between good and bad measurement. With infinite and nearly instantaneous data at your fingertips, robust experimentation can be a determining factor in a campaign's success—and can influence your next one. Here are four steps for applying a research mentality to your measurement.

With infinite and nearly instantaneous data at your fingertips, robust experimentation can be a determining factor in a campaign's success—and can influence your next one.

Four steps to prove marketing impact using experimentation

1. start with a hypothesis that's grounded in an objective.

Smart measurement begins with mapping metrics to real business objectives . To truly understand how to optimize and gain insight from campaigns, however, there needs to be experimentation—and that kicks off with a hypothesis. This gives you a starting point for your testing or investigation.

Your hypothesis should map back to an insight that will help prove the objective of the overall campaign. At Google, we start with the overall business objective before moving on to the marketing and campaign objectives . We aim to focus on a singular objective in each case, so that we have a clear definition of success. Then, we make sure the objectives align and ladder up to each other.

For example, a recent test we ran in an Android campaign rested on this hypothesis: that inclusion of multiple brand elements in the ad units would better support our campaign objective of lifting brand awareness than if we included just one brand element (see graphic in Step 2, below).

When considering a campaign objective, we think about "softer attitudes," such as awareness, education, consideration, and intent; and we break down consumers' actions and behaviors into binaries like trial or purchase and loyalty or usage. We then measure actions or attitudes through online tagging or surveys. More on that in our next step.

2. Devise a robust testing strategy, and don't mistake correlations for causation

Once you've figured out your hypothesis and tied it to the campaign objective, it's time to create a testing plan. Don't settle for observations and correlations. Instead, design experiments and run them to assign causality.

When it comes to experiments, people often think: "I'll try something different and see what happens." They don't create rigorous research methodologies that test a hypothesis and maintain a control group. When Google Media Lab runs experiments, we define control and exposed groups. This allows us to measure incremental action or attitudes and see how these measures shift after exposure.

Returning to our Android example, once we'd identified our hypothesis, we ran tests using three different banner ads and evaluated two variables: the Android logo and the Android character. We broke the campaign into three distinct groups (see below) and measured each group against a control group that did not see any ads. We then measured "unaided awareness," or a person's ability to recognize a brand without being prompted with possible names. We were ultimately able to determine that the presence of both the Android character and logo resulted in higher brand awareness.

Android Case Study: Testing the Logo and Character

Think with google, share this page, 3. ensure your testing variables are experimentally sound.

Researchers often talk about bias in experiments. It's not something well understood by the marketing community, but it happens often. At Google, we avoid bias with the setup that I mentioned above: control vs. exposed groups. We then randomize these groups and measure them simultaneously. This prevents time bias (either pre- or post-) and audience bias from affecting our experiments.

In the experiment for the Android campaign, we set up three groups, each with a control group, for a total of six "cells." We then measured the awareness lift that occurred in each of the groups that were exposed. We also limited the number of variables that we changed when testing something. By controlling for these factors, we could assign causality. Then, we felt confident in the insights we generated and the changes we could make to our next campaigns.

4. Choose robust measurement tools, and deploy them systematically

Ultimately, we know that the power of data comes in being able to slice and dice it in many different ways. That's where your measurement tools come in. We work with tools, such as DoubleClick and Google Analytics Premium, to organize our data signals (for example, location, time of day, past behavior and interests, and website usage).

These tools help us use the right data to reach the right audiences with our campaigns. Imagine the benefit of having the data and insights gained from previous campaigns at hand for your next programmatic buy (the focus of the first piece in our "Inside Google Marketing" series ).

We can then extend these insights and tests to other brands within our portfolio. This allows us to gather best practices across brands and campaigns. At the end of the day, we can assess and compare dollars being spent across multiple campaigns, and report up to our stakeholders with confidence.

While Steps 1-3 above will work for a single campaign, ideally you want to systematize measurement by using the same tools and methods to see insights across all campaigns. In doing so, you can make powerful cross-campaign, cross-publisher comparisons , and gain insights to break through today's vast multi-channel ecosystem.

Smart measurement is rooted in research

These days, there's a lot of talk about big data and the power of marketing science. Smart marketers approach measurement with a research mentality. They understand the need to root their measurement in objectives to ensure that their techniques draw experimentally sound insights. By standardizing tools and systematically deploying them across campaigns, they can easily compare efforts and results. Most importantly, they gain an understanding of what worked and what didn't.

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The 8 free market research tools and resources you need to know.

With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent.  However, conducting market research isn’t an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you have access to an endless array of top-tier tools and resources, you can uncover strategy-changing insights with relative ease.

Does that mean businesses with small (or non-existent) budgets are out of luck? Absolutely not.

Nowadays, free market research tools and resources are abundant — and you’ll be familiar with eight of our favorites by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

But first, some housekeeping:

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers — both current and prospective — with the intent of optimizing your business strategy.

Customer-related information that you may want to gather includes (but is not limited to):

• The goals they want to achieve
• The pain points they want to alleviate
• The income or budget that constrains them
• The products and/or services they use (a.k.a. your competitors)
• The strengths and weaknesses of the products and/or services they use

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because — if you’re thorough and open-minded — it dramatically improves your chances of long-term success. Only through market research can you uncover the insights you need to develop a product or service that (1) satisfies the demands of your prospects and (2) stands out from the competition.

For a complete overview of how conducting market research can benefit your business, here’s Market Research Defined and How to Get Started .

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive into the good stuff.

Top 4 Free Market Research Tools

For clarity, we will define a free market research tool as any tool that:

• Costs nothing, and
• Helps with the collection and/or analysis of customer-related information

Keep in mind that “customer-related information” encompasses everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

1. Google Trends

If you want to get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions — Google Trends is an excellent tool.

All you need to do is enter a search query and toggle with the filters. As an example, take a look at the level of interest in “office supplies'' in the U.S. over the past five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest peaked in February 2020 — at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Plus, you can explore variations in interest across the 50 states, as well as related topics and queries that are surging in popularity:

The “interest by subregion” data is powerful. In Wyoming, searches for “office supplies” account for a greater percentage of all search queries than in any other state. Your average resident of Wyoming, in other words, is more interested in searching for office supplies than is your average resident of, say, Louisiana — a valuable insight for anyone who sells office supplies online.

Equally valuable is the insight that searches for “where to buy office supplies in bulk” are on the rise — potentially indicative of an emerging pain point.

2. SurveyMonkey

As some of you already know, one of the best ways to conduct market research is to ask your customers a handful of open-ended questions. You can do this for free with SurveyMonkey .

Specifically, with a free SurveyMonkey account, you can ask up to 10 questions and field up to 40 responses with each of your surveys.

Open-ended questions you may ask your customers include (but are not limited to):

• Why did you buy our product?
• What has our product helped you accomplish?
• How does our product compare to others that you’ve used in the past?

With just three questions — well under the limit of a free survey — you can learn quite a bit about your target market. If, for example, the majority of respondents say they bought your product because they were struggling to do their jobs in a cost-effective manner, that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ pain points and your competitors’ weaknesses .

3. Make My Persona

As you collect and analyze customer-related information, it’s a good idea to create or tweak your buyer personas : detailed profiles of the semi-fictional people for whom your product or service is designed. In the context of market research, personas are useful because they help you synthesize and comprehend the information you’re gathering.

Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, you can use a wonderful free tool called Make My Persona .

Intuitive and fun, Make My Persona is a seven-step process that walks you through the essential components of your target customer: demographic information, firmographic information, job title, pain points, and so on. And if you want to go beyond the bare essentials, you can add as many extra sections of information as you like.

Important note: Your personas should be dynamic. As you conduct further market research and learn more about your target customers, your personas should evolve accordingly.

4. WordSift

Make My Persona is appealing, in part, because it enables you to make sense of raw data — to separate the signal from the noise. The same can be said about WordSift , the final free tool we’ll be discussing today.

Built to help teachers with the instruction of vocabulary and reading comprehension, WordSift allows you to generate word clouds: images that represent the frequency with which certain words are used in a given body of text. Look what happens when I copy the introduction to this blog post and paste it into WordSift:

Instantaneously — and unsurprisingly — I can conclude that “business,” “market,” and “research” are among the most frequently used words in the introduction to this post.

What does this have to do with market research? Well, let’s say you’ve been using SurveyMonkey to ask your customers about their reasons for buying your product. One by one, if you were to copy their responses and paste them into WordSift, you’d be able to see which words your customers use most often. That’s a market research gold mine!

Top 4 Free Market Research Resources

Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:

• Helps with the collection of customer-related information

The scope of “customer-related information" remains the same  —  encompassing everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

5. Bureau of Labor Statistics

A government organization that “measures labor market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy to support public and private decision-making,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a wealth of information.

Because this is a blog post about market research — not an economics class — we’ll focus on BLS’ industry- and region-specific information. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Data Tools drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink to something titled “Industry at a Glance.” Click on that, find your industry of interest, and explore the dozens of statistics that BLS has aggregated.

If, for example, you’re interested in the apparel manufacturing industry — either because you’re in the industry or you sell into it — you can see how earnings, prices, and productivity figures are changing over time.

Head back to the homepage, hover over the Subjects drop-down menu, and you’ll see a section labeled Geographic Information:

Select your region of interest, filter by state or metropolitan area (if necessary), and take a tour of BLS’ enormous library of area-specific data.

6. U.S. Census Bureau

On a mission to “serve as the [United States’] leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” the U.S. Census Bureau is another terrific resource that costs nothing to use.

Just as we did with the BLS, we’ll focus on industry- and region-specific information. Admittedly, using the Census website to find industry-specific information is slightly more complicated than it is when using the BLS website. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Explore Data drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink titled “Explore Data Main.”

Click on that, and you’ll be brought to the Census’ search engine. Then, click inside the search bar and select “Advanced Search.”

Underneath “Find A Filter,” type in the name of the industry you’re interested in researching. Once the search suggestions load, simply check the appropriate box and click “Search.”

From there, you’ll be able to explore thousands of data tables, maps, and whitepapers — many of them chock-full of industry-specific information that you can use to your advantage.

Finding region-specific information is a bit more straightforward. Head back to the Advanced Search engine, select “Geography” from underneath Browse Filters, and go from there:

7. Pew Research Center

A nonprofit dedicated to “inform[ing] the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” the Pew Research Center is one of the most authoritative sources of information for anyone striving to make better business decisions.

Whereas the BLS and the Census are (among other things) aggregators of economic data, the Pew Research Center is a “fact tank” — an organization focused on public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other forms of social science inquiry. 

So, although you can’t necessarily use Pew to uncover hyper-specific insights related to your industry or region, you can use it to learn more about your target audience. The best way to do this is through the Topics section of the Pew website.

Clicking that hyperlink brings you to an index of dozens of topics, ranging from Online Video to Homeownership to Democracy. Selecting any of these topics will bring you to a list of relevant content — reports, fact tanks, transcripts, and other forms of media that can date back as far as the early 1980s.

As an example, let’s say you’re developing a product or service that targets new homeowners. If you were to click on the Homeownership topic, you’d land on a list of reports like this one:

If I were you, that’s not a report I’d want to overlook!

We’ll wrap up today’s guide with a free resource specifically for those of you in the software world. Designed to help buyers determine which products are best suited to their needs, G2 is the leading source of validated, unbiased software reviews.

G2 is, in other words, an excellent way to find out what your target customers are saying about your competitors’ products. Do a quick search for the type of software you’re developing and you’re in business.

If you were developing a sales compensation software product and you searched this keyword, you’d be brought to the page you see below. To learn more about Spiff — one of your top-rated industry competitors — all you’d need to do is click “Read Spiff Reviews.”

If you want to get granular, you can filter reviews in a number of different ways. As an example, let’s say you’re developing a sales compensation software product specifically for small businesses. G2 has the filter you’re looking for:

And just like that, you’ve got access to dozens of valuable insights like this one:

Start using market research tools today!

If you try to bring a product or service to market without an understanding of your target customers, your chances of success are slim. According to the most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report , 84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years. With the range of choices at your prospects’ fingertips growing by the day, the need for a thorough market research strategy only intensifies.

We hope you find these free market research tools and resources useful. And if you decide to make the leap to a paid solution, make sure to request a demo of Crayon — the competitive intelligence platform that enables you to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside your businesses’ four walls.

See why Gong, Mastercard, and ZoomInfo trust Crayon to help them win more competitive deals.

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The 13 Best Market Research Tools

Jan 3, 2024

10 min. read

The 328 million terabytes of data we create each day can be very telling about your target audience’s preferences and buying habits. This same data can also be inaccurate and low quality, depending on the source. That’s why the market research tools you choose matter — you need to be able to get the most up-to-date insights and trust what the data is telling you.

While traditional manual methods of market research and secondary research (aka desk research or complementary research ) still have a time and place in the digital world, marketers are supplementing them with market research platforms and software that do most of the heavy lifting.

Astronomical amounts of market-related data are created at lightning speed, far outpacing our ability to consume it all. To help find, filter, sort, and make sense of all this information, we’ve chosen 13 of the best market research tools to streamline and improve the process :

Meltwater Radarly

Think with google, ubersuggest, surveymonkey, answer the public, brandmentions, heartbeat ai, u.s. census bureau.

Tip: Also take a look at the top secondary research companies out there.

A leader in AI market research tools, Radarly is Meltwater’s AI-powered market research platform that provides real-time insights into consumer preferences . This always-on consumer intelligence suite uses a combination of data science, AI, and human market research expertise to surface insights about customers based on online conversations and activities.

Most of the world’s data is unstructured ( about 90% , by some estimates), making it harder to act on and understand its significance. Radarly brings structure to the unknown by detecting patterns and understanding audience sentiments.

Also, Meltwater for market research continuously sources new information and works in real-time. This gives marketers an advantage by working with the latest data so they can make informed decisions when it matters most.

See Meltwater Radarly live in action by requesting a free tour of our platform. Simply fill out the form at the bottom of this post and we'll be in touch.

Statista offers data trends and reports on a wide range of topics and interests, from Facebook’s monthly active users to leading beer brands based on sales. In total, the market research platform spans more than 170 industries and 150 countries .

What sets this resource apart is its visualizations — all of Statista’s stats have been compiled into neat and tidy graphs that are ready to publish or share in your own reports. This makes it easy to see trends over time or gain quick insights about consumer preferences.

There’s a chart for just about anything, and they’re updated on a regular basis. In many cases, Statista will include a brief explanation of the chart’s findings and recommend related charts for further research.

Google’s status as the world’s most popular search engine makes it a great resource for market research. Google has access to billions of first-party data points based on what people are searching for online. 

For market research purposes, users can tap into Google Trends to see the popularity of searches over time. See the terms that are trending on a daily or weekly basis, or check out shopping-related trends to predict the hot new products of the season ( trend prediction ).

Google’s Market Finder can also pinpoint new markets that might be a great fit for your product or service. Learn how various markets compare to each other and how your business might fit in.

And if you’re selling physical products, you can see how sales trends might impact your business using Google’s Rising Retail Categories . Retailers use this tool often to predict hot-selling holiday items and right-size their inventory.

Attest brings old-school focus groups and surveys into the digital era with its rapid-response approach. In the past, organizing interviews and focus groups took weeks or even months. Once the research activities were finished, analysts required additional time to compile the results. No more.

With Attest, you can hear directly from consumers who fit your audience profiles, with ready-made questions and respondents at your fingertips. All responses are recorded in the Attest platform, and the market research software analyzes results and collects consumer insights on your behalf.

Users pay per response, so you can scale your market research as needed.

A popular survey tool, Typeform offers a mobile-friendly way to collect market research insights . It’s unique in that it only shows users one field at a time to limit distractions. The look and feel lend to a more casual, conversational approach, which may encourage survey takers to be more candid in their responses. (We can’t prove it, though.)

Users can create various question types, including multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and scale ratings. It’s intuitive and makes basic market research a breeze.

Ubersuggest, a popular k eyword research tool , also has market research capabilities packed into its user-friendly interface . That’s because keyword research is a form of market research , giving you a glimpse of what people are actively searching for online.

Let’s say you’re launching a new facial cleaning device for your beauty brand . By using Ubersuggest for keyword research, you can also uncover:

• Other brands selling facial cleaning devices
• Publications talking about facial cleaning devices
• The popularity of online searches for facial cleaning devices
• Competition for related keywords
• Questions related to the keyword “facial cleaning device”
• Cost per click to rank for the keyword via paid ads
• Search volume (and interest) over time

This is a great tool to help you see who your top competitors are online, what type of content ranks well for a keyword, and how crowded a market is for a particular product or service.

Market research doesn’t always have to be a costly, complex beast, and SurveyMonkey is a great example. This easy-to-use survey tool can create simple or in-depth surveys sent to targeted audiences for feedback. 

For example, you might have one-off questions to ask customers who made a purchase to learn more about their buying habits. Or, you might want to send longer surveys to customers to help develop a new product. No matter your use case, you can customize surveys to reach highly specific audiences and compile their answers instantly. 

SurveyMonkey also offers turnkey market research solutions, including a global panel survey, translation services, and a reporting dashboard. These services can help you reach more people and get more use from your data.

Answer the Public is a free search listening tool that compiles the questions people are asking online. These questions can serve as a starting point for new product development, product improvements, and content marketing .

This market research software uses autocomplete data from Google . When you start typing a search, Google will try to guess what you’re looking for based on what other people have searched for. You can do this manually, but it’s time-consuming and relies only on your ideas.

Answer the Public makes life easier by compiling related questions in an easy-to-understand graphic. And since the data comes from Google, market researchers can trust its reliability and quality.

Ever wonder what it is about a brand (including yours) that people love? The things that get people talking? BrandMentions can help provide some context.

Specializing in social media monitoring , BrandMentions takes the next step into showing why a particular keyword is buzzing. Type in a keyword and you’ll see recent social media posts that also contain that keyword.

You can also see the keyword’s Reach, Performance, and Number of Mentions — all of which can come in handy when you’re planning a new product launch. You can use these insights to plan your launch-related posts to generate the most buzz.

Tip: Learn more about brand monitoring , brand tracking , brand reputation measurement , about the best brand tracking software , and understand why your brand mentions are spiking .

AI market research tools like Heartbeat AI allow you to put market research on autopilot , or at least close to it. Using sentiment analysis , this market research tool recognizes themes and trends in qualitative text data.

No more poring through pages and pages of text — Heartbeat AI can quickly surface insights about how your audience feels regarding your brand or products (or your competitors). What’s more, it can turn these insights into attractive visuals for simpler understanding or sharing with other stakeholders.

Qualitative research can be more difficult to sort and analyze because it contains more variables. Unlike quantitative research, which deals with specific, measurable data, qualitative research involves the complexities of human behavior and perception. The results are subjective in nature, and it involves more work to extract their value.

Discuss aims to change the narrative with AI-powered insights . Offering video capabilities, built-in note-taking, and auto-generated highlight reels, marketers can capture the “Aha!” moments without losing efficiency.

The market research platform makes it easy to refer back to conversations and keep their audience engaged throughout the process, leading to more complete data.

One of the oldest but most trusted market research sources , the U.S. Census Bureau offers basic demographic information about U.S. citizens. This platform gives you instant insight into America’s people , including things like family sizes, income levels, and populations.

Beyond demographics, the market research platform has thousands of tables and maps to bring your research to life. You can customize your own maps and tables using any of the data available.

Another option is to find your business’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code , and then filter the Tables tool to focus on your industry. This allows you to see where your industry is most popular and where it might be over- or under-saturated.

Tableau from Salesforce is a business intelligence platform that connects to all of your data sources, making it easier to connect the dots between disparate systems. It excels at transforming unstructured data into visualizations to streamline decisions.

Their goal is to democratize data and make it more accessible and user-friendly. It accomplishes its mission with a user-friendly interface, visual data transcriptions, and a community of more than a million members who share how-tos and best practices.

Make Your Market Research Tools Work for You

Online market research tools aren’t replacing the traditional survey or focus group — they’re enhancing them by providing an always-on approach to speed up results. By tapping into the wealth of data people are openly sharing online, businesses can gain more insights than ever before, on demand.

Meltwater offers some of the best tools for market research that are accurate, reliable, and easy to use. By tapping into billions of data points and analyzing them in the context of your business, you can make valuable data-driven decisions to move your company forward.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

Continue Reading

How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

What Are Consumer Insights? Meaning, Examples, Strategy

Market Intelligence 101: What It Is & How To Use It

Consumer Intelligence: Definition & Examples

Secondary Research Guide: Definition, Methods, Examples

What Is Desk Research? Meaning, Methodology, Examples

Top Secondary Market Research Companies | Desk Research Companies

17 Google Marketing Tools You Should Be Using

Published: April 06, 2018

How to Market on Google

• Use Google My Business (GMB) and claim free ad space for your business.
• Improve your website's SEO using Google Search Console.
• Buy ads on Google through Google Adwords.
• Host your website's videos on YouTube, the largest video community in the world.

You may have heard of this little thing called Google. You know, where 3.5 billion searches for information are made per day?

But Google is more than just a search engine. So much more.

In fact, there are numerous Google business tools in addition to its search engine that can be hugely valuable if you're a marketer.

So, we decided to round up a list of the most essential Google marketing tools at your disposal so you can be sure your business is taking full advantage of all Google has to offer.

17 Helpful Google Marketing Tools for Business

1. google my business.

Want to get yourself some free advertising on Google ? I kid you not -- it's a real thing.

All you have to do is claim your Google My Business listing (formerly known as Google Places), and your business can get featured in the search results (as well as in Google Maps) for local searches like the one pictured below. Check it out -- all the businesses within the red call-out in the screenshot below are local Google My Business results for the search "mexican restaurant, boston."

Best of all, unlike Google AdWords (which we'll touch on later), none of those businesses paid for their positions in these local results.

If you haven't already claimed your Google My Business listing, follow the simple steps in this blog post to get your listing up and running . Keep in mind that as Google walks you through the setup of your listing, you'll automatically create a Google+ Page for your business as well, which leads us to our second Google marketing tool ...

2. Google+ Business Pages

With the death of Google Authorship and the elimination of Google +1s from search results, the jury is out about the importance of maintaining an active Google+ Business Page these days if you're not a local business. That said, given Google's massive empire, we think it behooves all businesses to play it safe and create a Google+ Page, even if you only update it every so often. To create a page, get started here .

But if you're a local business, setting up and maintaining a Google+ Page goes hand in hand with your Google My Business listing (see above), making Google+ even more critical for you. And considering your Google My Business listing will include a link to your business' Google+ Page, it's important to take some extra time to make your page the best it can be.

Learn more about how to optimize your Google+ Page in this free ebook , and you can check out HubSpot's own Google+ Page here .

Last, if your audience is active on Google+, it may be smart to add the Google +1 share button to your website -- particularly to articles on your blog. Google uses social signals as a ranking factor, so making it easy for your website visitors to share your content on Google+ can help your content rank better in search. To learn how to create Google +1 buttons, check out this post .

HubSpot customers can easily add the Google +1 button to their blog within the HubSpot Marketing Platform .

3. Google Webmaster Tools

Want better insight into how healthy your website is in the eyes of Google? Just set up a Google Webmaster Tools account . Google Webmaster Tools will alert you to any red flags that could prevent your site from getting found in search results, and help you analyze your existing search traffic so you can understand how visitors are currently finding you.

Here's an overview of how Google Webmaster Tools can help you optimize your website, straight from the horse's mouth ...

4. Google Suite: Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms

Collaborating on a project with other marketers on your team? Google Suite is a collection of some great collaboration tools you can use in place of typical software on your desktop. Here they are:

• Google Docs for Word documents.
• Google Sheets for Excel spreadsheets
• Google Slides for PowerPoint presentations
• Google Forms for easily collecting simple survey responses

Consider using them to share and collaborate on marketing data analyses, ebook or blog post drafts, marketing or SlideShare presentations , or surveys and polls. Projects save automatically and can also be accessed across devices with a quick download of a mobile app. 

Grab  this free guide  to learn how Google Suite can benefit your marketing campaigns.

5. Google AdWords

If you want to give your organic efforts to rank in search a bit of a jumpstart, it might make sense to dabble in Google AdWords , Google's pay-per-click (PPC) product. If you have yet to try it, here's how it works:

You create ads that target specific keywords related to your business, and your ads appear above or to the right of organic search results on Google when people search for these keywords (see screenshot below). The cost your ads depend on the competitiveness of the keyword you're targeting, but you only pay if visitors actually click on your ad.

For more resources about how to do PPC effectively, check out our PPC Marketing Hub here .

Keep in mind that AdWords can quickly become an expensive marketing tool, and unlike organic search, it offers quick wins rather than longer-term, lasting (and free) results. That said, if used smartly, PPC can help you plan your organic search strategy.

By testing different keyword variations using PPC, you can quickly figure out which keyword will send you quality traffic. You can then use this knowledge to target your organic search engine optimization and content creation efforts. This leads us to tool number five ...

6. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

If you're looking to boost your organic SEO, you'll want to do some keyword research first and foremost. Keyword research helps you identify keywords to target as you're creating blog and website content, focusing your SEO and content creation efforts so you can get found by the right searchers.

The Google AdWords Keyword Planner , though a tool meant to help you plan your AdWords campaigns, can also help you search for new keyword ideas and suggestions to help you with your organic keyword research as well. Keep in mind you will need to set up an AdWords account to use the Keyword Planner, but that doesn't mean you actually have to create an ad.

If you're a HubSpot customer, our Keywords App has keyword research tools built right in. The app provides keyword suggestions based on relevancy, monthly search volume, and difficulty.

7. DoubleClick Search by Google

If Google AdWords helps you decide which keywords to target, DoubleClick Search is the other half of your search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.

DoubleClick is a suite of products by Google to help advertisers make and measure their ads so that they target the right spaces online. Its Search tool's purpose is to "close the loop" on their marketing efforts between search and display, so that both advertising channels are complementing each other. The tool helps you understand which keywords to target given your audience, and how this market's search behavior is changing in real time.

8. Google Trends

In addition to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Trends can be a great tool for helping you make smarter keyword choices. It enables you to evaluate the popularity of certain terms, compare them against other keyword variations, analyze how their popularity varies over time and in different regions/languages, and shows related keywords, which can be helpful in getting new keyword suggestions.

Trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title? Do a quick comparison in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often:

Google Trends can also help you identify trending topics, news, and content, which may be helpful for spotting opportunities to newsjack ... but more on that in number 10.

9. Google Drive

Google Drive is Google's free online storage service, allowing users up to 15 GB of free storage in the cloud for files like photos, documents, designs, videos, etc. Trying to send a large image or PowerPoint file to others on your team? Google Drive allows you to share your files or folders with others, making collaboration easy and reducing the headache of too-large email attachments.

10. Google Alerts

Google Alerts enables you to monitor the web for mentions of specific keywords or phrases. Once set up, you'll receive either email alerts or results via RSS whenever these phrases have been mentioned online. For instance, you can sign up to get notified whenever someone mentions your company, products, executives, or your competition.

This PR tool is a great way to stay on top of your business' online reputation and react to online mentions of your brand in a timely manner.

11. Google News

Newsjacking , or capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to amplify your sales and marketing success, is a great way to piggyback off the success of a news story that is already getting traction. If you're interested in taking advantage of newsjacking in your marketing content strategy, use Google News to search for and identify news relevant to your industry with good newsjacking potential.

To learn more about newsjacking and how to integrate it into your content strategy, check out our " Complete Guide to Newsjacking ."

12. Google Voice

In an era when people use their phones to surf the web, it's only natural that we use the web to manage our phone conversations as well. Google Voice , albeit only available in the U.S., allows you to do just that -- making it easy to manage multiple phone lines, create personalized voicemail messages depending on who's calling, and easily transcribe voicemail messages.

This also allows you to measure how useful a phone number is on your website. If you include this number on a Contact Us page, for instance, you can gain insight into the needs and behavior of users who visit your site.

To learn more about the various features available with Google Voice, check out Google's support documentation , and watch the video overview below.

13. Google Calendar

Being organized is key to being a productive marketer -- especially if you're wearing multiple hats. Enter Google Calendar , an easy way to organize your day, keep track of meetings, and share your schedule with others. Things get even more efficient if your business uses Google Apps for Work so your colleagues can automatically use Google Calendar to book conference rooms and check coworkers' meeting availability.

But when it comes to marketing, Google Calendar can also be a great tool for setting up an editorial calendar to organize your blog and other marketing content, which can be shared among content contributors both internally and externally.

For inspiration in setting up your own editorial calendar, check out our free Blog Editorial Calendar Template as well as this post for setting up your editorial calendar in Google Calendar .

HubSpot customers can easily set up an editorial calendar that's integrated with their blog and other HubSpot Marketing Platform apps within the HubSpot software.

14. Google Analytics

How many of your website visitors are brand new versus returning? How long are people spending on your site? Does it have a high bounce rate ?

All of these important analytical questions can be answered by Google Analytics , Google's free website analytics product. Google Analytics can give you smarter insight into your website traffic and help you understand how people are finding and navigating your site.

That said, website analytics is definitely not a replacement for marketing analytics ( here's the difference ). You'll still need integrated marketing analytics software like HubSpot's to help you measure your entire marketing funnel and track your visitors all the way through to becoming leads and customers -- the metrics by which marketers are ultimately measured.

15. Google FeedBurner

Want to grow your reach? Then you should be allowing your visitors to subscribe to your website content, particularly your blog, using feeds. By setting up a Google FeedBurner account, your site visitors can subscribe to your content and receive regular updates via their web browsers, RSS readers, or email. And considering subscribers are extremely critical to the growth and reach of a business blog , offering subscription options for your content isn't something you want to overlook.

HubSpot customers can get RSS feeds (as well as email subscription features) for their blogs right out of the box.

16. YouTube

That's right! YouTube has been a Google product since 2006, and considering the fact that YouTube's more than 1 billion users watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views every day, video marketers can't afford to ignore it as a powerful marketing tool.

So if you haven't already, create a YouTube channel for your business here . Then check out HubSpot's own YouTube channel here .

17. Google AdSense

If you do manage a YouTube channel, don't forget Google Adsense.

AdSense is the perfect tool for marketers who manage and create content for a growing internet property, but don't know how to make money off of it. If you apply to YouTube's Partner Program and host ads on your videos, you're actually required to have an AdSense account.

The tool connects your web property with a network of advertisers who are looking to host ads on channels that appeal to their audience. So, if you manage a blog, website, or video channel that matches the audience of an active advertiser, AdSense will place their ad on your property, bill the advertiser, and pay you for hosting it.

Not everyone needs every Google tool on this list, but even the most basic products -- when used the right way -- can make a business leaner, smarter, and more efficient when communicating to its customers.

Learn how to Google Suite can make your next marketing campaign run more smoothly.

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Best Google Forms Timer Addon

How to Use Google Forms for Market Research and Customer Profiling?

Google Forms is a free and easy-to-use tool that can help you gather the information you need to perform market research and customer profiling. In this article, we will explore how to use Google Forms for market research and conduct customer profiling, from creating and customizing your survey to analyzing the data you collect.

Market research and customer profiling are critical components of any successful business strategy. By understanding your target market and customers, you can make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales. 

Whether you’re a small business owner or a market researcher, Google Forms is a powerful tool to create a survey for research, that can help you gain valuable insights into your market and customers.

Definitions

Market research.

Market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market, about the viability of a product or service to be/has been offered in that market. Along with that, about the past, present, and potential customers for the product or service; research the characteristics and needs of your business’s target market. 

The industry as a whole, and the particular competitors you face. The goal of market research is to identify a target audience, opportunities, and threats in the marketplace, and to help companies make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales.

Customer Profiling

Consumer profiling, also known as “customer profiling,” is a process used by businesses to better understand their “target audience” or identify who their “ideal consumers” are. In other words, it is a marketing strategy that utilizes data to construct a detailed representation of an ideal customer who will likely engage with your product or service.

It involves collecting and analyzing data about consumers, such as demographics, purchasing habits, paint points, touchpoints, and other preferences. This information can then be used to create detailed profiles of different consumer segments, which can help businesses tailor their marketing and sales efforts to specific groups of consumers. 

Consumer profiling can also be used to identify potential new customers and to develop targeted marketing campaigns.

* In summary, Market research is the process of understanding the market and customers, while Consumer profiling is the process of understanding the customers in a more detailed way, like demographics, purchasing habits, and preferences.

How to use Google Forms for market & customer surveys?

Market research provides the information necessary for customer profiling, to create a comprehensive understanding of customers and the most effective way to engage with them. 

There are different methods to do market research through, surveys (quantitative research), focus groups, interviews (qualitative research), observations, field trips, etc. On the other hand, to create customer profiling, it is necessary to have enough data to have an overview of your customers. 

So there are different methods to gather data for customer profiling and that is through market research which includes customer surveys, customer experience monitoring, customer interviews/focus groups, & talking to the sales team (they’ve worked with your current customers). 

Hence, the common way to do market research & customer profiling is through surveys. And what’s better than google forms to do quantitative research that provides us with factual data. –

Let’s look into the steps to create google forms for research;

• Create a survey – Go to Google Forms , and sign in with your Google account. Choose the ‘blank form,’ and a blank new form will open. 
• Start with the body of the form – add a title and clear description of the survey, the reason behind it and etc. 
• Add Questions specific to the survey – Google Forms has various question types including images and videos that can be used to create a survey questionnaire. 

If you’re creating a general market survey to research how your product doing in the market, consumer preferences & behaviors, etc. Then focus on asking questions that revolve around the reason. 

For example, you can ask questions in the survey like – 

• Demographic questions – age, income, profession, etc
• How did you learn about XYZ product?’
• How long have you been using XYZ products?
• How likely are you to recommend our product to others?

Aside from this, if you are using google forms for customer surveys that provide you with information for customer profiling, then ask questions related to consumers. For instance, 

• Demographic questions – age, gender, background, income, etc
• What are their interests & hobbies?
• What are their biggest challenges (personally & professionally)? What triggers them to find a solution? (identify the pain points of your customers)
• What is the primary reason for not purchasing a specific product?
• Configure Settings & Themes – Once the body of the user research google form has been created. The next step is to configure the settings and themes of the survey. Under the ‘Settings’ tab, you’ll find all the settings options to configure that you can do. 

Like, enabling the progress bar, adding a confirmation message, etc. Click on the color palette icon and customize the theme of the form from there. It has very limited options to customise.

• Send Survey – Share your google forms for market research by sending a link, email or embedding it on your website. You can also set restrictions on when the form can be filled out and limit the number of responses through the help of add-on like ExtendedForms.
• Survey Results Analytics – Gather responses by viewing them in real-time or downloading them as a spreadsheet. You can also view summary statistics and create charts and graphs to analyze your data.

Make Google Forms Interactive with ExtendedForms

Whether you are creating google forms for market research or any use cases, with an add-on you can make it more interactive somehow. ExtendedForms is a google form free add-on for countdown timer, proctor feature, classroom integration , and so much more. 

You can use the add-on for your quizzes/tests to add timer and can also set restrictions on when to filled out the form. Aside from that, sending customize invites can be done with the help of extended forms. Furthermore, it allows to add custom support email in every form, so that respondents can resolve queries through the potential support team.

Check out more features from its website and even try the free version!

Related Posts

How to Duplicate Google Forms? [In 2 Ways]

How to Use Proctor System in Google Forms – Ultimate Guide

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