Investing in market research is an option that should not be reserved for corporations. Small business owners can also benefit from market research, as it can yield useful insights that can benefit customer service, product development, and sales performance.
Acquiring the right budget for market research is another story: it can depend on many factors, some of which can be a tight fisted board or a lack of overall funding for a fledgling company. In these situations, one need not be deterred, as there are many other avenues which don’t require any capital in order to be taken advantage of.
We have chosen five online tools that are currently available for free which can help assist anyone and their respective market research plans:
U.S. Demographics Research
One of the most underrated yet powerful resources available online is The American Fact Finder. This Government website allows one to search for any piece of data related to any geographic location in the United States. This can be extremely beneficial for the exploratory phase of any market research foray, as it will give you access to documents such as population estimates, housing estimates, demographic characteristics, business statistics, all of which can be broken down further into age, sex, race, location, and much more. This search engine provided by the US Census Bureau is a huge asset both for exploratory market research as well as later phases.
Economic Data
Economy.com, also known as FreeLunch.com, offers something similar to the American Fact Finder, but with a more worldwide economic and financial bent. The data is provided by Moody’s Analytics, which specializes in capital markets and risk management. Their data covers an astonishing 180 countries which represents approximately 93% of the global GDP. Using Economy.com’s data in conjunction with American Fact Finder can offer rather robust data on a truly worldwide level.
Macro Data Platform
We think that The Statista Statistics Portalis great not only because it collects a ton of worldwide data but also aggregates it into a single platform for users to parse through. The data is easily presentable, with charts and graphs ready for anyone to see. Any market researcher can quickly gain insights through Statista’s easy to navigate platform. It lists all market sectors, complete with companies and institutions, offering a huge swath of data on media, business, finance, and politics. With over 600,000 users and 10,000 companies, it has become a favorite for many market researchers.
Practical Surveys
In recent years, Survey Monkey has simply become anonymous with online surveys, and still offers a free, basic version of its powerful survey platform. Survey Monkey allows users to target its survey audience toward specific demographics buy buying a targeted audience. Additionally, Survey Monkey offers a feature called Skip Logic, which changes questions depending on the answer given prior. Many of these additional features do cost money, but Survey Monkey is a solid free tool for anyone who needs a quick survey for some basic market research to be completed.
Competitive Intelligence
Our Free Sample Market Research Report is unique in that we at Upfront Analytics will create a truly custom report for you within our app game ecosystem, built around the data you give us. We collect our market research data through app games, instead of traditional surveys – this way users don’t suffer from any test-related biases, and can answer our questions freely. For our free sample report, we will take the information that you supply us with about your brand/company and your competitors, and then place them into our games. Within 3 days, we will return data based on a national representative of the population, offering brand awareness data for your company. This is a truly unique form of gathering market data, and we are happy to offer a free sample to anyone interested.
Market Research Can Be For Everyone
The five tools listed above are both useful for anyone starting out in market research and looking to start gathering data, as well as brand managers and chief marketing officers who have budgets and need accurate data. Obviously the tools listed above are not the be-all end-all of the market research world – some of them are great for initial intelligence, and some of them offer far superior products which will cost money. But we felt it important to offer up free tools for everyone to partake in and get their market research efforts up and off the ground without spending any resources.
Apart from Survey Monkey, which has been used successfully by SMBs for some time, positive experience communicated to me re. low-cost or no-cost DIY market research tools is spotty at best. There is always some analytical acumen required in applying these tools, and most SMBs simply have little or none of it.. Though the occasional brand manager, marketing manager, and/or CMO at these companies may have some research and interpretive capabilities, the challenge, as with almost all carousel brass rings, is that getting real use from this array of tools is out of reach for just about everybody else..
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the reply! I partially agree – for most business owners, if they simply peruse the above websites for research, they may not find what they are looking for off the bat. But I will say that those sites offer some powerful introductory market research for any business owner – large and small. And if they find a helpful path, they have enough data and info to decide to start really investing in market research.
Thanks,
Joe