
It is crucial to have an understanding of your target audience for successfully launching your brand. Discovering the needs and demands of your customers is the roadway to building an effective marketing strategy.
But how do you find your target audience?
To get a solid knowledge of your target audience, one of the best ways is to find the proper tool that can help you get started with your customer research journey and give you valuable insights into their choices and feedback.
The following are 15 of the best tools to consider using for your brand or product to get an idea of your potential target audience:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free-to-use business intelligence tool that helps businesses of all sizes have an in-depth look into their website or app performance.
Using the Google Analytics tool, you can track and monitor the visitors coming to your site for a certain period of time, as well as those who visited once without taking any significant action.
It also showcases your audience’s demographics (gender, age, and interest) to help you understand which regions are more interested in your product or service.
With the help of this information, you can easily make a picture of your ideal customers- what they like, where they buy, and what they buy.
Features:
- While determining the target audience for your brand, you can understand the behavior of the users visiting your site.
- With the ‘Reporting’ section of the platform, you can lead your marketing efforts in the right direction by understanding who you should be focusing on (your best online customers).
- You can further improve your website targeting to adhere to your chosen target audience through the demographic dimensions.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is a complete toolkit package that helps you to conduct extensive market research and explore actionable insights. Its Keyword Analytics feature helps you determine the exact keywords your target audience actually searches online to locate your website.
This way, you can define your target audience and develop a strategy to make sure you’re visible to them when they search for you.
With SEMrush’s Audience Insights, you can also know which social media channels, blogs, and websites your customers mostly use and what type of content they consume. With constant monitoring of their interaction with brands, products, and services, you can better understand their values, desires, and needs.
Features:
- The ‘Topic Research’ tool helps you to find trending topics in your industry along with popular questions that you can answer in your content to reach out to your audience.
- With the SEMrush’ Market Explorer’ tool, you can know the demographics for any marketing audience with the breakdown of ‘men and women, their age, location’ etc.
- SEMrush Competitor Analysis tool helps you to determine how your competitors are driving their traffic and gives you an estimate of your market share.
SEMrush’s paid plan starts at $119.95 per month and gives you complete access to their Keywords, SEO, and traffic data.
3. Social Mention
Social Mention is an easy-to-use social media software tool that consolidates user-generated content from throughout the world wide web into a standard data stream. Not only that, but it also gives you the ability to track how customers perceive your brand on a real-time basis in the world.
Social Mention is a subtotal of the Brand Mentions, that is specifically designed to engage in an online conversation in real-time. The tool lets you know anytime and whenever someone talks about your brand online.
With this, you can have a better understanding of how customers are interacting with your brand and how to create products that meet their exact needs and demands.
Features:
- You can easily review all the mentions of your brand on the internet with the help of Social Mention.
- You can also learn about the number of people talking about your keyword at any particular point in time.
- The tool integrates with major social media apps to drive more meaningful data.
4. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey, a really popular customer survey tool, merges an enterprise-grade forum with a set of advanced marketing and customer feedback systems to assist businesses in creating and evaluating customer survey reports to get meaningful insights from them.
It allows businesses to create surveys of various sizes, be it quick two-question surveys or large, comprehensive surveys that are sent to large numbers of audiences.
The tool is extremely easy to use, with more than 230 customizable templates that make the survey design process hassle-free. The questions and answers in the survey are framed in such a manner that gives you complete control to tailor the survey as per your needs.
Features:
- A highly customized question bank with 13 question types, including short answers, MCQs, rating scales, interactive sliders, and image-based questions.
- Uses an AI-powered analytical model to obtain expert feedback on the questionnaire draft.
- It supports the Logic Function that enables you to show or hide certain questions based on the participant’s previous responses.
- The tool also lets you know how long it will take to complete your designed survey and scores your form based on how likely users will fill your form.
With SurveyMonkey free plan, you can get unlimited surveys, including 10 questions per survey. You can avail of its premium plan that costs $35 per month for unlimited questions.
5. Typeform
Personalized marketing is the key to making your every effort count, and that’s where Typeform came into play.
Typeform, which deals exclusively in stunning, insightful surveys, helps marketers know their target audience demographics and build a marketing approach that appeals to the right audience and get direct feedback from them.
Typeform’s intuitive builder makes the survey making simple. All you need to do is choose your preferred question type catalog, which is built for business-centric purposes like lead generation or customer feedback and make them appealing to gather more responses and detailed insights.
Features:
- The drag and drop functions enable users to build forms with various personalized features quickly.
- MCQs, reviews, estimation measures, free-form messages, and other question options are available.
- Integrates with other popular tools like Google Sheets, Slack, Salesforce, etc.
Typeform offers a free plan, but you can access the paid features of the tool for as low as $25 per month.
6. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is indeed a robust market research tool that gives you insight into what your potential customers are searching for on the internet.
You can directly enter any keyword and see what real-world questions are being asked about it in the two most famous search engines- Google and Bing. With this, marketers can easily understand the customer needs and emotions behind the questions that they ask.
Whether you are doing market research for your own business or for your client work, the tool assists you in understanding your existing customers and your competitors to create more effective marketing proposals.
Features:
- It pays attention to the most useful phrases and questions around a keyword or searches term that people are asking related to your brand.
- It serves as an excellent tool for understanding customer analytics, and the information can be used to generate immensely helpful content that your target audience searches for.
- It keeps you updated about your customers’ search trends and behavior regarding your keywords from time to time.
The free version of AnswerThePublic meets the basic needs of individual marketers and bloggers. However, you can always upgrade to the paid plan for $99 per month.
7. Google Trends
Google Trends is a free customer research tool that tells you the popularity of a particular search term in comparison to other search terms.
The tool displays information and stats for a search term in the form of trend line graphs for a specific time frame broken down by countries, cities, regions, and languages.
With this, you can find out the most frequently searched keywords and measure their potential success while planning out your marketing or SEO strategy.
On and all, Google Trends is a great tool to find emerging trends or hot topics to create content that your target audience wants to consume.
Features
- It helps you discover popular topics or queries in your industry that you might have missed.
- With Google Trend’s homepage, you can identify the latest trends in different countries.
- It also helps you discover how much interest or action has been shown by the users in your product or brand.
- You can also use Google Trends as your competitor analysis tool by finding out how frequently their product, brand or service is being looked upon by people worldwide.
8. Audiense
Audiense is a reliable social media management tool for Twitter that not only helps you identify your target audience but also personalize your message and send it to your audience.
With the help of the social media data provided by this tool, you can have a clearer understanding of the interests and behavior of your audience, based on which you can shortlist the people most suitable for becoming customers of your brand.
You can further use the information to come up with better marketing tactics and make yourself more visible to your target audience. While the primary focus of the tool is Twitter, it helps in top-level buyer persona research and marketing segmentation.
Features:
- You can find the top influencers in your industry, understand your customer’s mindset and discover what topic interests your customers the most.
- You can analyze your audience based on their bio, gender, age, location, job titles, and other personal details.
- The tool helps you discover how to engage and activate your audiences across multiple social media channels.
Audiense has a free version available, but it has limited features. So, if you want to avail more advanced features, then you need to upgrade to one of its premium plans.
9. Statista
Statista is a cloud-based technology that lets commercial enterprises visualize and analyze statistical data pertaining to multiple market sectors and industries. The tool has an easy-to-use interface – just go to their website and search a term.
The query will return with hundreds of market research data, graphs, and statistical dashboards created from a variety of sources.
The data keeps on updated with the new information and can be used to understand consumer behavior and create buyer personas, online questionnaires, and even for content marketing campaigns.
Features:
- It is a great tool to keep up with the latest trends, surveys, and forecasts in your industry from over 150 countries.
- Every statistic depicted by Statista comes with a date demonstrating when the data was collected, the number of participants, their region, and demographic details.
- You can integrate the tool with other marketing tools simply by copying the basic HTML code.
You can access a lot of data from Statista for free. However, you can avail of the premium plan for $39 per month when billed annually for more detailed niche reports and data.
10. Google Keyword Tool
If what you really require is to have access to search queries that your target audience is using, then the Keyword Tool is an excellent choice.
The platform is a simple and effective SEO tool for exploring popular keywords and takes into account the different keyword information from top sites such as Google, YouTube, Amazon, and others.
By finding the exact keywords or search terms your customers are searching, you can locate the right potential customers for your product or business.
Features:
- It allows you to filter search terms, words, or phrases based on geographical location, language, and the device customers use to browse.
- It helps you to analyze the change in the search volume of a particular keyword over a period of time.
- Other than finding the keywords that people are searching for, the tool also helps understand the psychology of the target audience.
11. Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence tool that assists marketers in connecting, exploring, and visualizing their marketing data to generate valuable insights into their digital media spending, customer journeys, etc.
The system enables the world’s largest enterprises to discover the power of their most useful assets, i.e., their marketing data and their people.
With a detailed understanding of your customers, products, competition, and more, marketers can better implement and plan their marketing campaigns.
Features:
- You can explore the unusual data sources of Tableau and find more new opportunities for targeted marketing.
- Take inspiration from the dashboards of global organizations like KPMG, Spotify, and Zillow to take your content marketing campaigns to the next level.
- Visualize and analyze the market research data to facilitate smooth actions and make viable marketing decisions.
Tableau works on a subscription-based model. For Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server, the pricing starts at $35 per user per month, and for Tableau’s fully hosted online version, the pricing starts at $42 per user per month.
12. Upwave
Upwave is another customer research tool that helps marketers to launch essential customer research surveys and generate valuable insights from them. The platform lets you visualize your marketing data in real-time and analyze the success of your marketing campaigns.
The tool enables you to create charts and graphs to present to your stakeholders and helps you to create personalized surveys for data collection. The biggest advantage of Upwave is that it collects data from the genuine people for your survey instead of someone who gets paid to fill up the survey form.
Features:
- Its Optimisation Recommendations let you know whether or not your marketing campaign is working or not so that you can make suitable changes or adjustments before the end of your campaign.
- It makes sure that your campaigns are reaching the right set of audiences with complete data on their behavioral and demographic details.
- It integrates well with popular tools like Zapier and Zoho.
Upwave subscription starts at $4 per user per month.
13. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is an excellent form builder that helps you conduct extensive market research, analyze customers’ views and thoughts about your products, and collect their feedback before launching them.
All of these can be done by simply inserting a survey form on every page of your site. It supports ten key types of questions, including checkboxes, text-based answers, and name and contact details for lead generation in each survey form.
Not only this, Qualaroo has several targeting options based on behavior, locations, and demographics to make sure that the right people are seeing your forms, thereby saving a lot of time for you to filter the responses relevant to your business.
Another amazing feature of Qualaroo is the Qualaroo Nudge system that controls who sees the forms pop-up, when and where the form pop-up, and for how long it has been viewed.
Features
- Its simple-to-use dashboard with a simple design, simple layout, and neat appearance makes it easy to navigate.
- Its ready-to-use templates are highly professional to ask just the right questions from your customers.
- Its sentiment analysis feature lets you analyze customer written responses and gives you the general customer sentiment that the feedback displays.
- It allows integration of your forms with much third-party software, including Google Analytics, Slack, HubSpot, etc.
Qualaroo does not offer any free plan. However, it comes with a 14-days free trial, and its premium plans start from $80/month.
14. Userlytics
Userlytics is an excellent tool for remote user testing and research, which helps businesses get an insight into their customer’s journey with multiple features like device targeting, defining buyer personas, and disqualifying participants based on the screening questions.
Testing is done based on the tasks carried out by the participants. After taking the questions-based test, the users are asked about the difficulty of the questions. You can keep the questions open-ended, rating scales queries, or MCQ-based.
Userlytics has another outstanding feature of screen recording and webcam with which you can understand the reaction of the users while answering the questions in the survey.
Features:
- An excellent platform doing user testing of your mobile apps, videos, display ads, and websites.
- It has a clean and intuitive interface that makes the setting up of the test, reading, and reporting a breeze.
- The tool contains a live conversation feature that lets the host conduct live sessions and schedule a call with participants.
To access the Userlytics tool, you have to pay a reasonable cost of $49 for creating easy and quick surveys.
15. Talkwalker
Last but not least, you can use the free Talkwalker customer research solution to analyze the phrases, terms, words, concepts, ideas, and personas of the customers that your brand is trying to reach on a real-time basis.
You can also learn about the discussion boards or forums as well as social media sites where your customers are active, which will help you maximize the potential of your marketing approach.
Features:
- Generate Talkwalker alerts to analyze your competition, industry, trends, etc.
- It monitors all the mentions of your brand and its keywords online.
- The platform provides various analytics tools that help you in conducting efficient market research.
Final Words
With the help of these custom research tools, you can avoid wasting your time and money on launching your products to the wrong audience. These tools help you gather feedback from your potential customers for your products so you can come up with a solution that appeals to the expectations and demands of your customers.
We have made your search easier with all the 15 best tools listed above. Now it’s up to you to pick up the tool that best suits your brand and marketing needs.