Business owners who want to understand their customers’ needs and outsmart competitors can gain insights using market research tools. These tools illuminate relevant demographic information, customer preferences, and social trends—all of which ultimately impact sales.
Compiling this strategic business intelligence into a cohesive market research report can help you identify new markets, craft effective marketing strategies, and more. Ultimately, market research supports data-driven decision making, providing an insightful, methodical path to business success.
8 steps of the market research process
The market research process can be divided into eight steps:
1. Research the industry. Compile stats and data on your industry at large and within your niche. Identify new trends, technologies, companies, and products, and legal, social, or economic conditions that impact the industry and your business.
2. Identify market trends. Use trend analysis to track both qualitative and quantitative data across the market over time. Study global ecommerce trends to identify products, marketing tactics, and consumer behaviors that show a growth trajectory.
3. Investigate the competition. Conduct a competitive analysis to identify what drives your customers toward other brands.
4. Identify market gaps. Look for holes in the market your business can fill.
5. Define your target market. Who is your ideal customer? Outline who they are (gender, age range, values), where they spend their time (geographic location, preferred social media channels), and how they spend their money (i.e., their shopping habits or consumer behavior patterns).
6. Identify barriers to entry. Starting a new business or initiative can be challenging. Common complicating factors include startup costs and legal requirements.
7. Create a sales forecast. Before making your first sale or introducing a new product, estimate future revenue and growth potential.
8. Optimize your business strategy. Adjust your business strategy based on what you learn. Use your market research to refine your products, marketing plan, customer service, and pricing to better capitalize on market opportunities and meet customer needs.
Tips for effectively using market research tools
- Start with affordable options
- Use industry reports for broad insights
- Gather customer feedback directly
- Harness artificial intelligence
Market research tools help you create a cohesive business strategy at any stage, whether you’re launching, pivoting, rebranding, or expanding. Whether you run a Fortune 500 company or a small business, choosing the right tools is key to crafting suitable business and marketing strategies. Here are some tips for using them well:
Start with affordable options
When you’re starting out, you can leverage free and inexpensive tools. Scores of websites offer valuable data to help you assess consumer demographics and interests, including the Pew Research Center and Google Trends, which are both free to use. Many paid platforms, such as SurveyMonkey, also offer limited free basic plans.
When launching Heyday Canning Co., cofounder Kat Kavner Woolf used free tools such as Google Forms and good old-fashioned spreadsheets to gather and organize information. “Before we got to the point of developing the brand and designing everything and coming up with flavors, we first wanted to validate that there was a real opportunity,” Kat explains on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We started by just going out and looking at all of the products that were on the shelf and putting together this giant spreadsheet of every single canned food product. We mapped what was out there and did a lot of research on the big canned food companies.”
Concrete data and competitor intelligence allowed the company to identify market opportunities. “We had this hypothesis that the canned food category as a whole was very much ready to be reimagined,” Kat says. “There was this big hole in the category, and there was no startup brand that was pushing the limits to try to reimagine what canned food could be.”
Use industry reports for broad insights
For broad market insights, you can purchase reports compiled and written by experts, researchers, and consultants.
Kat finds information compiled by Nielsen and SPINS to be some of the best on the market: “If you are exploring a category within CPG, it’s super helpful if you can get your hands on consumption data from Nielsen or SPINS,” she says in an interview. “This is the ultimate tool to understand what people are buying.”
Petia Abdur-Razzaaq, the CEO of digital marketing firm The Stylista Group, recommends McKinsey research as a foundation for understanding industry trends.
Gather customer feedback directly
As you build your market knowledge, start talking to consumers within your niche. A survey creation tool can help you perform market research by asking potential customers about their experiences and interests. Targeted surveys also help you understand consumer preferences and desires.
“It helps you gain a perspective of how the market is either meeting or not meeting the trends that are shaping consumer tastes,” Kat says.
For particularly detailed consumer insights, speak with customers directly. Petia typically interviews clients’ customers via surveys; however, a handful of respondents are so enthusiastic that they’re willing to provide feedback over Zoom. These calls help reveal what some of the most engaged customers like and dislike.
Petia notes that it’s helpful to add an incentive—such as a chance to win a $100 gift card—when she creates surveys for clients’ customers. “People tend not to want to do those things unless there’s something in it for them,” she says.
Harness artificial intelligence
AI and emerging technologies can extend your team’s capacity, enabling you to collect and analyze larger volumes of customer data and extract key market insights.
OpenAI’s deep research can help with customer research. Jones Road Beauty recently used it to create five customer personas based on an analysis of product reviews, Reddit threads, and social media comments.
On Shopify Masters, commerce expert Andrew Faris of AJF Growth describes the tool as follows: “You give it your business. You give it some competitors’ businesses. You say, ’These are the categories in the space; here’s what I can know so far about which ads are working. What can you tell me?’ Within five minutes, it’ll give you a 10-page report. It can tell you who your most likely customers are, who tends to shop in this category, and how you’re priced compared to your competitors. It’s a little bit pricier, but relative to the time cost or to the cost of hiring a research firm, it’s unbelievable.”
You can also lean on AI-powered sentiment analysis tools from companies like Brandwatch and Qualtrics XM to help you analyze customer feedback, reviews, and survey responses, and identify trends.
Market research tools for entrepreneurs
- Google Trends
- Statista
- Pew Research Center
- SurveyMonkey
- Tableau
- Qualaroo
- ChatGPT
- BuzzSumo
- Qualtrics XM
- Browse AI
There are scores of market research tools to choose from at any stage of your business’s evolution. Here are some of the best market research tools to get you started:
Google Trends
Use Google Trends (and Google Keyword Planner) to gauge consumer interest in trending topics. It can also help align your SEO strategy and marketing campaigns with your target market’s needs. Google Trends’ graphs use Google’s search engine data to provide real-time insights by showing peaks and dips in a given topic’s search volume.
“This gives you real-time data in terms of what consumers are actually looking for online by search terms and by industry,” Petia says.
Pricing: Free.
You can use Google Trends to compare search stats for terms related to your products. For example, a chocolate company might compare the terms “bean to bar” and “artisanal chocolate” to determine which consumers use more. The comparative keyword research tool tracks multiple search terms on a single graph, providing market and consumer insights into brand popularity.
Statista
Statista aggregates data into visualizations and publishes reports on 170 industries worldwide. Its statistics on specific companies, such as TikTok or Amazon, can provide valuable insights into engagement and ecommerce trends, and you can learn about industry-specific growth across fields ranging from AI to sustainable fashion and online food delivery. This information, compiled into reports and graphics, can help you identify market gaps and relevant trends.
Pricing: A free basic plan offers limited access. The starter plan costs $199 per month and includes access to two million statistics, while higher tiers provide access to Statista’s analysts and advanced forecasting tools.
Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center is a great starting point for understanding social and political opinion trends. Although the nonprofit didn’t explicitly design its public opinion polling for market research, Pew’s data analysis can illuminate why consumers shift habits—for example, due to changing technology, social developments, or other cultural phenomena.
Pricing: Free.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a market research survey platform. Conduct online market research surveys or use the tool to gather consumer feedback on events, user experience, and satisfaction. Use pre-built survey templates or customize survey content and design.
All paid plans include unlimited surveys and questions per survey per year. The more expensive plans include additional features, such as 24/7 email customer support, multilingual support, and data visualization.
Pricing: The basic plan, limited to 10-question surveys with 25 responses, is free. For individuals, paid plans with additional functionality start at $39 per month. For teams of three or more users, plans start at $30 per user per month.
Tableau
It’s typically easier for people to understand data visualizations, such as charts and graphs, than to extract meaning from lists of numbers. Tableau lets you create beautiful visualizations from your market research data, from colorful pie charts and bar graphs to Venn diagrams.
Pricing: Tableau plans start at $75 per month for one user.
Qualaroo
ProProfs Qualaroo is a customer feedback tool that prompts ecommerce shoppers to answer questions when their responses are top of mind. What does this look like in practice? Rather than sending post-purchase surveys, which can easily get lost in a crowded inbox, Qualaroo collects feedback at checkout.
For instance, when shoppers browse your pricing pages, a small Qualaroo feedback box might appear asking whether the prices seem fair. Or, if a customer is about to leave your site, a pop-up might ask them to quickly explain why they didn’t make a purchase.
Qualaroo is easy to use, making it popular with small businesses. Its pop-up menus prompt customers to provide simple ratings, providing business owners with useful audience insights. You can use this survey data to assess what frustrates or delights your customers.
Pricing: A free basic plan for startups and small businesses includes limited feedback-collection functionality and supports up to 50 responses per month; business plans start at $19.99 per month and offer unlimited feedback collection and other features.
ChatGPT
Ridge CEO Sean Frank uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT to analyze market research data. “I go on Shopify, and I get all these reports, all these screenshots. Instead of doing anything manually, I just take a screenshot, drop it in ChatGPT, and it runs the analysis for me,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters.
This approach expands his team’s capacity, minimizes bottlenecks in the market research process, and helps the company extract actionable insights from raw data. “Now my entire team is operating like data scientists,” he says. “This democratization of data analysis has been massive for us. Marketing managers make faster decisions, and inventory planners spot trends earlier. Everyone has the autonomy to answer their own questions instead of waiting in line for the data team.”
Pricing: ChatGPT’s free plan limits research functions, memory, messages, and access to its advanced large language model (LLM) GPT-5.2. Paid plans, starting at $8 per month, offer fewer limitations, provide access to more advanced reasoning models, and allow users to create custom tasks, projects, and LLMs.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a research and analytics tool for monitoring online mentions, finding relevant influencers, tracking industry trends, and more. Its content research tool indexes billions of articles and posts, providing audience insights and research reports to help you connect with your target market.
Pricing: Plans start at $199 per user per month for unlimited search capabilities, with higher tiers offering additional users, alerts, and features such as influencer outreach, app integrations, and location searches.
Qualtrics XM
Experience management platform Qualtrics XM offers a suite of strategy and research tools, including market assessments, pricing studies, message testing, sentiment analysis, and more. Access all its tools via a centralized data hub equipped with AI to help distill insights. You can also use it to process customer feedback and even enable video-based qualitative surveys, gaining actionable insights for your business.
Pricing: Qualtrics XM offers a free basic online survey tool with access to three surveys, each with up to 30 questions. For pricing on advanced strategy and research products, contact the company for a quote.
Browse AI
Browse AI is a practical AI market research tool for brand monitoring, competitor intelligence, and market analysis. You can use it to track mentions, gather reviews posted to third-party sites, and collect pricing and product data. Features include no-code website scraping, site monitoring, spreadsheet data import, and prebuilt robots for scraping popular market research sites such as Reddit and Pinterest.
Pricing: Browse AI offers a free plan for up to three users, with full platform access and app integrations. Paid plans, starting at $19 per month, allow users to add more websites and include email support or a dedicated account manager.
Market research tools FAQ
What are the primary types of market research methods?
You can conduct market research in the field and online, using methods such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys. You can also use industry data to understand market conditions, and analytics and sentiment analysis tools to understand customer behavior.
How do market research tools work?
Different market research tools feature varying capabilities. Market research tools can generate industry trend reports, track social media mentions and sentiment, help you design, distribute, and interpret surveys, and analyze your website and social media performance.
How will AI change market research?
Many market research platforms already use AI. Qualtrics XM’s research platform, for instance, provides an AI assistant that can help you distill insights from the data you’ve gathered on customers and competitors.
