List Of 10 Best Research Tools For Understanding The Target Audience.

Are you looking out for the best research tools to understand your target audience? Then you’ve come to the right place. You don’t have to go through hundreds of articles to collect the best research tools. We’ve done the hard work for you and compiled the best free and paid tools available for audience research.

You’re probably flooded with online marketing spam and promotional emails, and it often gets confusing to decide which tool to use in order to engage with the audience online or from where they can know their target market, target demographics, or from where the one can collect their audience insights. 

Here are the top 10 research tools which you can use to fulfill the desired requirements:

Google Analytics 360: Acquisition Tab:

In order to run an effective business plan, one can use Google Analytics because it can provide you all sorts of free tools in one place to analyze audience insights data for business purposes.

Features:

• The Acquisition tab in Google Analytics will help you to identify which platform you should advertise.
• Where you can find potential consumers.
• It will help you to identify the website of the target audience.

Pros:

• Google Analytics provides you with tools free of cost.
• Here Google Ads account can be linked with the Google Analytics account.
• Here you can keep track of your e-commerce platforms.
• Here you are allowed to collect pieces of information from various other platforms.
• This can be used on various other online interfaces like mobile phone applications or websites.

Cons:

• The free version of Google Analytics is good for the newbie but for the users with high web traffic, then they have to upgrade it with the premium plan which can cost you around $150,000.
• In order to run Google Analytics one should be well equipped with all sorts of knowledge because there are the chances that the user can get confused sometimes.
• The user can get confused while using Google Analytics because of the availability of many numbers, dashboards, demographics, settings, etc.

Pricing:

Google Analytics 360(Premium): $150,000 per year.

Facebook Business Page Insights:

Since Facebook is used by almost everyone therefore it can play a very good role in serving a perfect business platform and almost every business has a Facebook business page. You can easily get in touch with potential customers and get audience insights using this research tool.

Features:

• With the help of this tool, you can identify the Net Likes under the likes tab.
• You can get to know different types of engagement content.
• With the help of “Actions on Page”, you will be able to know how well your page is engaging the users to take the next step in doing business with you.
• Under the People section, you will be able to get detailed information about the demographics of your audience and their maximum activity time.
• In the Video section, you will be able to see how many users have watched your videos & for what  time duration.

Pros:

• Facebook is capable of collecting all the valuable information across the platform and supplying it to your system.
• It helps you to get a lot of audiences.
• This provides the user access to detailed analytics.

Cons:

• The management of this page consumes quite a lot of energy and time.
• The use of requires commitment.
• The selection of bad choices made on social media can spoil the reputations of your business.

Pricing:

The full suite price starts at $100 per month with a free trial of 14 days.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform(Salesforce):

It is a one-stop platform where you can get the updated data because they update fresh data every day. It helps to store all the information about customers, get your audience insights and analyze it.

Features:

• It helps in the collection of all the lead details from phone calls, social media platforms, emails, web forms, or even channels.
• Another interesting feature of the CRM platform is that it helps the user to send mass emails, plan drip email campaigns, keeping track of the conversation with the clients, and can even generate automated emails for special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, others for the clients.
• It has a reporting and analytics feature which helps in supporting marketing, sales, customer service, e-commerce, and others.
• Sales pipeline features help the user to sort, filter the deals and also helps to send emails for the selection of the customer.
• Workflow automation helps the user in creating smart workflows using rules or logic.

Pros:

• With the help of the CRM platform, the data of the customer can be accessed remotely.
• This helps in speeding up the conversion process.
• The cost management is low.

Cons:

• The CRM platform may cause a threat for businesses in case of security.
• The user must have good knowledge about the numerous features available or the confusion can cause harm.
• If the database is not managed appropriately it can cause loss of precious data.

Pricing: 

Lightning Unlimited Edition: $300 per month

Lightning Enterprise Edition: $150 per month

Lightning Professional Edition: $75 per month

Lightning Essentials Edition: $25 per month

Consumer Barometer:

This is the awesome tool provided by Google which helps the user to pick and make a selection from an assortment of topics as well as asking questions to the customers more accurately.

Features:

• It compares the digitally trending data over time.
• It can explore the role of the internet in the lives of the audience.
• It is capable of discovering curated audience insights.
• This helps in creating your custom analysis for a better understanding of the use of the internet by the audience.

Pros:

• This interface is easy to use and also provides detailed reports.
• It is a time-efficient tool.
• The cost of this tool is pretty affordable.

Cons:

• There is no branching of logic possible after a single screener.
• The questions can be shown out of the context to the respondent for the rest of the survey.
• There is no availability of rank-ordering questions.

Google Trends:

Google Trends is also recommended as one of the best free research tool out of many research tools for understanding the audience insights. Here you can find the most trending searches from the Google Search Engine worldwide or by country. This tool helps you with insightful data and graphs based on trending searches.

Features:

• With the help of the “Search Volume Trends” feature you can find the trending keywords for creating content.
• Another cool feature of Google Trends is finding related keywords. The breakout word will be visible for the search terms that are growing more than 5000%
• With ‘Interest by subregion,’ filter, you can easily uncover local search trends.
• The LSI keywords will help you with on-page SEO.
• Besides the content, you can also find keywords for YouTube videos.

Pros:

• It has a good user interface as well as can be accessed very easily.
• It is free of cost.

Cons:

• The context present in the search is not clear.
• There is a lack of analytics in google trends
• Sometimes the search items are not displayed because of the low search quota.

Pricing:

 Free

Chartbeat:

The Chartbeat is one of the research tools which helps in providing the user analytics to blogs and websites. This is a great tool out of many research tools present for the blogger helping them to understand the content which keeps the audience engaged.

Features:

• It provides advanced queries.
• Slack integration
• Segmentation
• Real-time reporting
• Retention

Pros:

• It is user-friendly with a simple user interface.
• It works faster and is source tracking
• It provides real-time metrics.

Cons:

• It is not integrated with apps.
• It does not have great features as Google Analytics.
• Some metrics like the view of the photo gallery cannot be measured.

Pricing: 

$7000 per year with the free trial.

Surveys:

In order to collect more demographic information about your target customer, you can use a survey for your most valuable platform. If you are capable enough to motivate your customer for taking the survey then you are ahead in the market.

Features:

• This tool can help in the customization of the pages like updating the colors, fonts, and other designs as well as templates.
• It helps in the randomization of questions for you.
• With the help of the data analysis feature, you can easily view the responses of the audience by observing the chart, graphics, and others.
• Website Integration will help you in linking your website to a survey.
• The availability of multiple language options helps in delivering surveys around the world.

Pros:

• It helps collect qualitative feedback.
• It is available at a low cost.
• It is easy to build and implement.

Cons:

• Sometimes customers do not want to take the survey because of its time consumption
• It does not provide full data.
• The customization in surveys can have the risks of a certain type of errors.

Pricing:

 $0.10 per question

Questback:

Questback is a feedback platform that allows the organization to understand its customers and engage its employees.

Features:

• This has the cool feature of team administration and project management.
• It helps in data quality maintenance.
• It helps in importing and managing the data of the respondents of the survey.
• It does the survey monitoring.
• The routing and filtering feature helps them to show the audience relevant questions.

Pros:

• It is easy to use.
• It provides automated reports of the respondent.
• It has a good survey workflow.

Cons:

• It is quite expensive to use.
• It does provide a free version or free trials.

Pricing:

 One has to request pricing.

Soovle:

Soovle helps in gathering all the suggestion services in one place. This can mostly be used for content writing purposes. It has the capability of finding the keyword from more than 15 search engines at a time.

Features:

• Soovle provides country-specific search volume data.
• The available keywords are based on queries.
• It helps in exporting data in CSV
• There are more than 15 search engines present.
• Soovle is a very simple interface to use.

Pros:

• Soovle is easy to use.
• The keywords suggestion are represented as a visual search cloud.
• With the use of the free version, three searches can be conducted in a day.

Cons:

• Soovle doesn’t include the search engines that are not under Google or Bing.
• There is no display of search volume metrics.
• The pro package rates are quite high.

Pricing: 

Free to use

Quantcast:

This can be regarded as the best tool out of many research tools available for understanding the target audience. With the help of a wide range of analytics and data mining tools, the organization can easily understand its audience.

Features:

• It collects data from millions of web and mobile platforms.
• It helps in competing for the audience demographic analysis
• It analyses the return visits of the audience
• This provides custom audience segments.
• It also provides insights into any content or ad inventory.

Pros:

• It helps the user to know the age and gender of the visits made by customers.
• It is easy to use and also it is capable of basic computer benchmarking.
• It can help the user in figuring out the shopping habits of the customers.

Cons:

• It causes problems during allowance of access to their API
• Some generalizations of data available are useless.

Pricing: 

Price ranges may vary from $19 to $499 per month.

I hope this article helped provide all the essential list of research tools to research your target audience. Let us know which are your favorite research tools and if you know another research tools that is worth mentioning, please feel free to contact us with the link to the tool.