Conducting market research pulls details together to help you choose new products or services to launch. They also help identify your audiences and best marketing strategies so you are ready to act without the guesswork.
Businesses use market research software to minimize risk and make more data-driven choices.
I own a small business, and by gathering facts and opinions, I can better predict whether new products or features — and for more prominent companies, even locations — will succeed before investing.
Here are 25 of the best tools for conducting market research, including a few recommendations directly from HubSpot market researchers and bloggers who use them.
Helpful Market Research Tools & Resources
1. Similarweb
Similarweb is probably the highest quality, most well-known, and most convenient way to get and compare traffic information about any website you land on — short of having an expert analyst whispering in your ear, which could get awkward.
Their free suite of products — including the Chrome extension — is worth exploring and gives you useful, high-level information. The deep insights come from taking advantage of their database of real-world information on global website performance gathered over time, which they’ve already been building for over 10 years. They have their finger on the pulse of online business worldwide, from sales to sites to stocks.
Microsoft, Amazon, and even Google use Similarweb and the insights they provide on other enterprise-level operations down to small businesses. If you want to know how your company stacks up and then initiate a robust research and marketing campaign, these are serious tools that can help you grow.
What I like: One of their add-ons is called App Intelligence, and it can benchmark your growth and track your progress against millions of apps — for both iOS and Android — and provide daily insights on app rankings, engagement, retention, and more.
Pricing: Starter plans cost $125 per month paid annually; professional plans cost $333 per month billed annually; team and enterprise plans have custom pricing.
2. Glimpse
For Max Iskiev, market research analyst at HubSpot, one research tool stands out from the rest: Glimpse.
He said, “Glimpse is his favorite research tool. It’s quick and easy to use, allowing me to design and launch short surveys for real-time insights on trending topics.”
Writers for the Hubspot and other blogging companies have also used Glimpse to run short, 100-person surveys for articles (case in point: Are Sales Reps Rushing Back to the Office?).
Not only is Glimpse valuable for doing quick pulse-checks on the latest trends, but it also leverages the power of AI for even deeper insights.
“Glimpse really shines when it comes to open-ended questions, using natural language processing and AI to analyze emotion and sentiment, saving time, and offering invaluable insights,” Iskiev shared.
Best for: Those who can invest in AI tools for their businesses but don’t need a decade’s deep dive like users of Similarweb might.
Pricing: Starter Plan – Free; Professional – $500/month; Advanced – $1,000/month; Enterprise – custom pricing.
3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo offers several highly useful tools that work best as a content research tool for mid-size businesses and up. If you need many ideas for a whole lot of content, BuzzSumo is likely a good fit for your company.
Their monitoring tools can alert you to new content that relates to your keywords of choice.
This is smart for writers, content strategists, and those who manage writers and content strategists to stay on top of trends in what consumers want to know more about within your industry — so you’re right there to provide it.
BuzzSumo also gives you access to reporting tools that stream various sources of information to your dashboard, making it easy to keep up with developments and build visual assets to communicate about them.
You can find major influencers — worldwide — through BuzzSumo that fit your brand to sponsor and collaborate with.
Unfortunately, BuzzSumo doesn’t integrate well with Instagram, so you’ll want to focus on influencers that use other social channels unless you’re willing to do IG work on the side.
What I like: Their Chrome extension is a nice addition to their offerings for companies that work with freelancers and remote workers to take the work on the move.
Pricing: Free 30-day trials are available. Content creation plans cost $199 per month; PR and comms plans cost $299 per month; suite plans cost $499 per month; and Enterprise plans cost $999 per month.
4. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a sister product to UberSuggest, both being brainchildren of Neil Patel.
Answer: the Public watches what people are searching for and lets you keep track of how things change over time. By studying the changes, you can be at the front of trends — positive or negative — so you can respond to the changes quickly.
It’s billed as an excellent tool for public relations professionals to give them a heads-up on how their company is faring in the public eye.
If you fall on the wrong side of public sentiment, you can be right on top of salvaging the situation and making improvements to regain trust.
If you’re doing something right and see gains in positive engagement, you know to keep up what you’re doing and may even want to expand upon it.
Great examples of what organizations have done with information like this include Wendy’s ongoing roasts and savage clapbacks on social media.
The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s hilarious insistence on not bringing mountain lions in the house also nabbed engagement by the truckloads (of corgis).
What I like: I like that Masterclass videos are available. They make sure to include lots of opportunities to learn how to best use their products and get maximum value from the suite.
Pricing: Individual plans cost $9 per month; pro plans cost $99 per month; expert plans cost $199 per month. Lifetime Pricing is available. Individual lifetime plans cost $99, pro lifetime plans cost $199; and expert lifetime plans cost $1,990.
5. Statista
Statista is a data visualization website that takes data from reputable reports across the web and makes them easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators just like you.
“Statista is like my market research sidekick, giving me all the data I need without the endless search. No more digging through the haystack. With Statista, I can spot trends and make informed decisions with ease,” Icee Griffin, market researcher at HubSpot, told me.
One neat aspect of using Statista is that the same chart is updated as the years pass. Say that you want to allude to the valae of the beauty market in your proposal.
If your investor accesses that same graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers. Statista finds the most recent research to update their visualizations.
Pro tip: Statista doesn’t carry out original research, but does have around 100 analysts who seek out gaps in their resources to provide ever more useful, trending data.
Pricing: Basic plans are free. Starter plans cost $199 per month, billed annually. Professional plans cost $959 per month, billed annually.
GrowthBar SEO is all-in for AI. If your leadership wants a slice of the AI action at work in the company’s market research, this might be the tool to reach for.
It uses ChatGPT-4, and the peer-to-peer review site G2 ranked it the #1 AI writing tool for SEO in 2022 and 2023.
What sets it apart is that the AI writing assistant doesn’t just compile and give word to information it finds online.
It offers selections of relevant keywords, titles, headings, industry standard word counts, and link suggestions that you can choose from as you move through the outline.
They also include tools for keyword research, keyword ranking, and information about your keyword competitors. And because Google search is incorporated into the suite, you can do most, if not all, of your writing work on one screen.
Pro tip: As with all AI content, you’ll need a writer to bring the content to life by fact-checking information, adding unique or inside perspectives, meaningful quotes, and many other values that make the content rich to read.
GrowthBar SEO knows this, and you can source freelance writers there as well!
Pricing:A seven-day free trial is available. Standard plans cost $36 per month; pro plans cost $74.25 per month; and agency plans cost $149.25 per month.
7. Think With Google Research Tools
Wish you had information on your product’s likelihood of success?
Think With Google’s marketing research tools offer interesting insights on whether anyone is looking for your product (Google Trends), which markets to launch to (Market Finder), and what retail categories rise as the months and seasons pass (Rising Retail Categories).
If you’d like to market your product through YouTube, the Find My Audience tool allows you to investigate what your potential viewers are interested in and what you should discuss on your brand’s YouTube channel.
What I like: Free and incredibly useful in my experience, small and newer businesses really benefit from having tools like this to conduct market research and get their growth rolling.
Pricing: Free
8. Census Bureau
The Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching U.S. census data.
You can filter by age, income, year, and location. You can also use some of its shortcuts to access visualizations of the data, allowing you to see potential target markets across the country.
If you’re considering a highly competitive product or service, you can easily find out where your target industry is most popular — or where the market has been oversaturated.
Another helpful tool is the Census Bureau Business and Economy data, where you can also target premade tables depending on your industry.
Pro tip: The text information on each screen can be overwhelming, so here’s a shortcut for you. One of the best ways to use this tool is by finding the NAICS code for your business.
Then, access the “Tables“ tool, click ”Filter” on the sidebar, and search for your industry.
Pricing: Free
9. Make My Persona
Make My Persona tool allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. In this tool, you pick a name for the persona, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges.
This allows you to pinpoint both demographic and psychographic information.
Creating a buyer persona is an early step in the marketing process but an important one to avoid scope creep.
If you’re unsure about details like these and how to use market research tools for your business, check our blog post for reference or check hubspot marketing kit.
It’s completely free and helps you build a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making in your future marketing strategies.
Best for: Make My Persona is best suited to B2B product launches because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges.
Ideally, your product would solve a problem for them in the workplace or help their company achieve revenue goals.
Pricing: Free
10. Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to “connect to virtually any data source.” But the data isn’t presented in unreadable tables.
Rather, Tableau helps you visualize this data in a way that helps you glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.
You can visualize data on anything from corn production in tropical climate zones to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look you’d like into potential marketplaces and supplier regions.
What I like: Visual information for humans and pure data for the machines all in one. Tableau integrates well with spreadsheets and databases so that you can export Tableau data to Excel, back up records in Amazon Redshift, and more.
Pricing: Tableau Viewer plans cost $14 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Explorer plans cost $42 per user each month when billed annually. Tableau Creator plans cost $75 per user each month when billed annually.
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