Top 21 Marketing Research & Survey Tools: Conducting & Navigating SEM in 2026

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on Marketing Research and Survey Tools! In dynamic marketing, gathering insights and understanding customer preferences is vital for success. Marketing research and survey tools have become essential components of the marketer’s toolkit, offering powerful means to collect valuable data and feedback from target audiences.

This blog will explore the top research and survey tools available, their features, and how they can help businesses make informed decisions, refine marketing strategies, and enhance customer experiences. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a business owner looking to gain a competitive edge, get ready to delve into these tools to better understand your customers and drive growth.

What is Market Research and Survey?

Market Research

Market research is the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about a specific market, industry, or target audience. It involves gathering information on customer preferences, buying habits, market trends, competition, and other factors influencing business decisions. Market research helps companies understand their market, identify potential opportunities and challenges, and make informed strategies to meet customer demands.

Market research can be conducted through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, and data analysis. The insights gained from market research enable businesses to make well-informed decisions, mitigate risks, and stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.

Survey

A survey is a data collection method that asks individuals questions to gather their opinions, preferences, or feedback on a specific topic. Surveys are structured and standardized, allowing for efficient data collection and analysis. They can be conducted through various means, including online, telephone, face-to-face, or paper-based questionnaires.

Surveys are widely used in market research, customer satisfaction assessments, employee feedback, and academic research. By gathering data through surveys, businesses can understand customer needs and expectations, measure customer satisfaction levels, and gain valuable insights into their target audience’s opinions and preferences. The survey data helps businesses make data-driven decisions, improve products or services, and effectively tailor their marketing efforts to meet customer demands.

21 Best Marketing Research and Survey Tools

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 into whether anyone is looking for your product (Google Trends), which markets to launch in (Market Finder), and which 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.

Pricing:

• Free

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 data visualizations, which let you see potential target markets across the country.

One of the best ways to use this tool is to find the NAICS code for your business, open the Tables tool, click Filter on the sidebar, and search for your industry. 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 target premade tables depending on your industry.

Pricing:

• Free

Make My Persona

Make My Persona is a proprietary tool that allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. Defining who might benefit from your product is key to marketing it effectively. In this tool, you pick a name for the person, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges, allowing you to pinpoint demographic and psychographic information.

This tool is most suited for B2B product launches, because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges. As such, your product would ideally solve a problem for them in the workplace or help their company achieve revenue goals.

Also Read: 8 Best B2B Services Review Platforms For Your Business

Pricing:

• Free

SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow is a leading survey platform designed to transform small, mid-size, and large enterprises to create conversational, user-friendly surveys with ease. Launched with a vision to change the survey experience, SurveySparrow offers a range of features to meet all your survey needs, from customer feedback and market research to employee engagement and event evaluations. 

So whether you’re looking to improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty, or drive revenue growth, SurveySparrow has everything you need to create a world-class customer experience. With its intuitive interface, customizable templates, and advanced analytics, you will get a 40% higher survey completion rate.

Pricing:

• Free 
• Basic/ $19.00/ per month
• Starter/ $39.00/ per month
• Business/ $79.00/ per month
• Professional/ $249.00/ per month

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 to glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.

You can visualize data on everything from corn production in tropical climates to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look as possible into potential marketplaces and supplier regions. Tableau also integrates well with spreadsheets and databases, enabling you to export Tableau data to Excel, back up records in Amazon Redshift, and more.

Pricing:

• $12/user/month (Tableau Viewer);
• $35/user/month (Tableau Explorer);
• $70/user/month (Tableau Creator).

Paperform

A market research survey is an effective way to better understand your target audience and their needs by asking them directly. Since this step is integral to understanding your dream customer’s problems, you want to ensure the process is as interactive as possible and elicits an objective, accurate response.

With its free-text interface, Paperform is as simple as writing a Word document. Make your survey stand out by customizing colors, fonts, layouts, and themes, and create your unique look and feel. If you’re unsure where to start, you can use one of their expertly made questionnaires or market research survey templates to get you started.

With Paperform, you can add conditional logic to show or hide questions or whole sections of content. Create personalized paths for different personas to create more interactive forms that lower drop-off rates and boost customer interaction. Or use any of the 27+ question fields, like the ranking, matrix, or scale fields, to create visually engaging ways to collect information.

Pricing:

• Free (14-day trial);
• Essentials ($20/month);
• Pro ($40/month);
• Agency ($135/month).

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive customer feedback and experience management software that enables businesses to perform in-depth market research. One can use intuitive forms and surveys to collect customer data, capture demographic information, and even gather responses, opinions, and more.

The tool offers 100+ ready-to-use templates and 30+ question types to help create targeted surveys and capture data from target audiences. Its advanced user segmentation enables comprehensive market research and yields data-driven insights. One can also collect feedback and customer insights from various channels, such as the website, in-app, in-product, email, SMS, and more.

With Zonka Feedback, you can add conditional logic for branching and skip logic to make the survey more customized and gather more responses.

Pricing:

• Free trial for 14 days.
• Starter ($49/month);
• Professional ($99/month);
• Growth ($199/month)

Statista

Statista is a data visualization website that pulls data from reputable reports across the web and makes it easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators like you.

It helps you find even the most specific data relating to your industry. Are you planning on launching a new video game and want to know how many hours people spend playing video games? There’s a chart for that.

If your investor accesses that graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers. (Note that Statista doesn’t carry out original research.)

Also Read: Data Visualization Tools: Presenting Search Engine Marketing Insights Effectively

Pricing:

• Free; $39/month (billed yearly);
• $1,950 (one-time 30-day access)

Claritas MyBestSegment

Claritas MyBestSegment provides product researchers with tools to understand an area’s demographics and the lifestyles of its inhabitants. By finding out what a segment of the population does — without having to go out and survey them — you can find out which areas would be most receptive to a campaign or launch, which competitors are located nearby, and which lifestyle trends have shifted or are on the rise.

A snapshot of an audience segment provides basic information on household income, lifestyle traits, employment, and education. If you want more specific data on these topics, you’ll have to contact Claritas’s sales team to become a customer.

Pricing:

• Free;
• Pricing available on request

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth market research surveys to help you understand your market and consumer preferences.

With this tool, you can create targeted, user-specific surveys to collect feedback on your product. While using a data source can give you a general overview of your target audience and market, SurveyMonkey can help you get more granular insights from real consumers.

SurveyMonkey offers dedicated market research solutions and services, including a global survey panel, a survey translation service for international research, and a reporting dashboard that lets you easily parse through the results.

Pricing:

• Free, $32/month (Advantage Annual),
• $99/month (Premier Annual),
• $99/month (Standard Monthly).
• $25/user/month (Team Advantage, minimum 3 users),
• $75/user/month (Team Premier, minimum 3 users),
• Enterprise (Contact for pricing)

Typeform

Like SurveyMonkey, Typeform allows you to create surveys to get direct answers from your target consumers. It’s an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form builder that’s great for market research.

Typeform’s distinguishing factor is that it shows viewers one form field at a time. Its templates encourage a conversational, casual approach (like in its market research survey template), making it a better fit for product launches. If you’re targeting C-suite executives at established firms, consider a formal option such as SurveyMonkey, or keep your tone more formal.

You can create a wide range of question types, including multiple-choice, short-form, and rating-scale questions. Other features include recalling answers from previous questions and creating logic jumps.

Pricing:

• Free;
• $35/month (Essentials);
• $50/month (Professional);
• $70/month (Premium).

Upwave Instant Insights

Upwave Instant Insights is a consumer research tool part of the Upwave brand marketing platform. While it isn’t advertised as a survey-creation tool, it lets you launch market research surveys to gather consumer insights.

Instant Insights allows you to target audiences on Upwave’s partner ecosystem and visualize the data for easy scanning by key stakeholders and investors. One pro of using this platform is that Upwave distributes your survey to real people—not just people taking surveys for money, which could skew the results.

To create a survey, sign up on the Upwave platform, click your name in the upper right-hand corner, and click “My Surveys,” where you can create as many surveys as you want. For the Basic option, you have a limit of 6 questions, while the Advanced option allows unlimited questions.

Pricing:

• $ 2/study participant (Basic);
• $ 3/study participant (Extended);
• $ 4/study participant (Advanced).

Loop11

Loop11 is a user experience testing platform that lets you test your website’s usability, study user intent, evaluate your site’s information architecture, and examine how the user experience changes across devices.

This tool is useful for market research because it lets you determine whether your target consumers find your site easy to navigate. You can also identify snags that prevent conversions.

Loop11 tests your site by making users perform tasks. They then complete a short question about how easy or difficult the task was. Your product may be phenomenal, but you will only launch it successfully if consumers can buy it through your site.

You can use Loop11’s participants or bring in your own.

Pricing:

• $63/month (Rapid Insights),
• $239/month (Pro),
• $399/month (Enterprise)

Also Read: User Experience Testing Tools: Improving Website Usability for SEM

Userlytics

Like Loop11, Userlytics allows you to test the usability of your website, mobile app, and site prototype. You can target different devices, define a buyer persona, and disqualify participants based on screening questions.

Testing is based on tasks, and it asks a simple question about the task’s difficulty. You can structure the question differently, leaving it open-ended, providing multiple choices, or asking for a rating. Other formats include System Usability Scale (SUS) questions, Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions, and Single Ease Questions (SEQ).

Userlytics captures both webcam and screen recordings. You can compare the user’s answers with their reactions to the video to understand how they feel when interacting with your assets.

Pricing:

• $49/participant (Quick & Easy);
• $69/participant (Annual Enterprise);
• Custom pricing available on request

Temper

Sometimes you need a no-frills test to take the pulse of consumers. Temper lets you create a question, grab a code snippet, and add it to your website. The smiley face, “meh” face, and frown face make it easy for viewers to make a snap judgment.

One great way to use this tool is by adding the widget to a blog post announcing the launch of your new product. That way, you can gauge the product’s overall sentiment before launching it. You can also add it to a product page, an email, or a landing page.

When you include the widget, you can change the question to something tailored to your offerings.

Pricing:

• $12/month (Hobby),
• $49/month (Pro),
• $89/month (Business),
• $199/month (White Label)

NielsenIQ

NielsenIQ is a retail and consumer intelligence consultant that works with you to collect consumer insights, identify the best distribution channels for your product, and create a range of products that address the needs of your target buyers.

This service helps you view your product launch from all angles and delivers forecasting data that predicts how your sales will perform at launch. NielsenIQ can also run consumer insights surveys on its list of panelists and partners.

Because it operates like a consultant rather than a self-service software, NielsenIQ is a better option for established firms with a larger product launch budget.

Pricing:

• Pricing available on request

Also Read: 6 Best Audience Intelligence Tools For Customer Insights

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a simple tool for doing content and keyword research. You can input a phrase, and it’ll create a list of keyword suggestions. You can also see top-performing articles and pages to understand the types of content that rank for those keywords.

This tool is useful for market research because you can see who your top competitors are, how often your product is searched for, and whether there’s enough space in the market for the type of product you’re launching. You can also find out your target audience’s questions about the product. These questions can be turned into a blog post that informs your audience, increases brand authority, and drives conversions.

Alternatives to Ubersuggest include Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush.

Pricing:

• Free;
• $29/month (Individual);
• $49/month (Business);
• $99/month (Enterprise / Agency)

Pew Research Center

From economic conditions to political attitudes to social media usage, the Pew Research Center website offers a ton of free research you can use to better understand your target market. The site has interactive articles that allow you to filter and sift through the data for more granular, targeted insights.

Topics include U.S. politics, digital media, social trends, religion, science, and technology.

Pricing:

• Free

BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a social media monitoring platform that can help you understand what your prospective customers are buzzing about online. Search for a keyword, and BrandMentions will show you recent social posts containing that keyword and its usage context. After subscribing to the platform, you can also get sentiment analysis on the keyword.

You’ll also get other metrics, such as Reach (how many people view the keyword per day), Performance (how many people engage with the keyword per day), and Mentions by Weekday (when people mention the keyword).

You can use this tool for market research by determining when people are looking for your product on social media. You can use insights from this tool to post about the launch at the right time. It also allows you to find out how people feel about the type of product you’re launching. That way, you can refine your campaigns more effectively.

Pricing:

• $99/month (Growing Business);
• $ 299/month (Company);
• $ 499/month (Enterprise/Agency)

Also Read: Brand Monitoring Tools: Protecting and Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation

Qualtrics Market Research Panels

Qualtrics takes the pain of finding respondents for your market research surveys through an online sample service. After identifying your target audience, you can go to Qualtrics to access a representative sample. Use your chosen survey software or Qualtrics’ built-in platform for insights and feedback.

Pricing:

• Pricing available on request.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an advanced user and market research tool that helps you understand your target market with targeted surveys. You can run surveys on over six channels at once (such as website, app, product, social media, and mail) to get a 360-degree view of your existing and potential customers.

Its features include question branching, 12+ answer types, automatic survey language translation, in-depth audience targeting, pre-built survey templates, and an extensive repository of professionally designed questions.

In minutes, you can create surveys to collect data on your target audience’s demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits. It can help you map customers’ expectations and preferences, create customer personas, and segment your audience.

Qualaroo also promotes quick feedback analysis. Its in-built AI-based sentiment analysis and text analytics engine automatically categorizes the responses based on user moods. It also highlights key phrases and words in real time, saving hours of manual work.

Pricing:

• $80/month billed annually (Essentials);
• $160/month billed annually (Premium)

Conclusion

In conclusion, marketing research and survey tools are invaluable assets for businesses seeking to thrive in a competitive market. Gathering actionable data and feedback directly from target audiences empowers marketers to make well-informed decisions that resonate with customers. From conducting market research to measuring customer satisfaction and analyzing campaign performance, these tools streamline data collection and interpretation.

By leveraging marketing research and survey tools effectively, businesses can identify opportunities, address pain points, and tailor their marketing efforts to meet customer demands accurately. Embrace the power of these tools and let data-driven insights guide you as you navigate the ever-evolving marketing landscape, ultimately leading your business to sustained success and customer loyalty.

Also Read: Content Curation Tools: Finding and Sharing Relevant Content in SEM

FAQs:

What are marketing research and survey tools, and how do they differ?

Marketing research and survey tools are software applications designed to gather data and insights from target audiences, but they serve different purposes. Marketing research tools facilitate comprehensive data collection about markets, competitors, and consumer behavior. On the other hand, survey tools focus on gathering specific feedback from individuals or groups through structured questionnaires. While both contribute to informed decision-making, marketing research tools offer a broader scope, while survey tools provide in-depth customer feedback.

How can marketing research tools benefit businesses?

Marketing research tools offer numerous benefits to businesses. They enable market segmentation, identify new opportunities, and assess the success of new products or services. These tools help companies tailor their marketing efforts.

What advantages do survey tools offer for customer feedback?

Survey tools are crucial for business growth. They enable businesses to gather customers’ opinions, preferences, and satisfaction. Companies can target specific aspects of their products or services. Survey tools also provide a direct communication channel with customers, fostering better relationships and building customer loyalty.

How can the integration of research and survey tools enhance marketing strategies?

Integrating research and survey tools can significantly enhance marketing strategies. Market research tools provide a macro-level understanding of the market and its competitors, guiding strategic decision-making. Survey tools complement this data by providing a micro-level perspective from customers’ viewpoints. By combining insights from both sources, businesses can fine-tune marketing campaigns, optimize products, and tailor their messaging to better resonate with their target audience. The synergy between research and survey tools strengthens businesses’ ability to develop data-driven, customer-centric marketing approaches.