Market research is how you sharpen new ideas in the market, not in your mind.
Your internal team is so excited about their new idea – they’re convinced it solves your audience’s current problem. But does your audience agree? Why not find out before you invest time, resources, and money in development?
Market research tools reduce the legwork of the process – traditionally a very long-winded, time-consuming experience. Such granular levels of insight give you the quality data you need to underpin critical business decisions.
But which B2B market research tool is best for you? Here’s our roundup of the 9 best market research tools around.
How can market research help you test new ideas?
You can’t eliminate all risks from launching a new idea. But effective market research can make sure that you fail quickly and cheaply – if you fail at all.
McKinsey’s 2020 report, Derisking corporate business launches: Five steps to overcome the most common pitfalls, discovered:
“We’ve observed that when new-business launches fail, it’s not usually because of problems with technical feasibility. Rather, failure typically stems from flawed assumptions about the new product or service’s desirability to customers.”
B2B market research helps you answer some of the big questions:
- Understanding who you’re selling to: What does my target audience really want? What are they prepared to pay for it? Should we develop product X or product Y?
- See how you compare to similar companies: What are my competitors doing? What are audience perceptions of their brand, products and services? What makes our things different and better?
- Market landscape: Why is our market share decreasing? Is this new market big enough to scale into?
Validating your market using quality B2B market research tools gives you robust data that incorporates the nuances of your audiences.
As the McKinsey report points out: ”Smart teams think instead about creating an offering that doesn’t just serve a purpose but connects to customers’ emotional and social lives—and they don’t stop at understanding what a customer wants today but ask how it might change tomorrow.”
Market research is a way to listen to and empathise with your audience – and, yes, this is just as important in B2B industries!
Whenever you launch a new feature, product or service or enter a new market, your market research insights help to build success.
Choosing the right tool(s) for your market research goals
Different market research tools serve different purposes, making the decision even more complicated.
Here are a few things to help you find the best market research tools for you:
- Define your goals: Before you start comparing market research software, you need to identify clear objectives for your research. What do you want to know? How much data do you need to be a useful sample? What type of data do you need? How regularly are you going to run your market research? Getting clarity on your market research goals helps you curate a more specific list of tools.
- Find the right features: Now you know what you’re aiming for, you need to scour each market research tool’s list of features to make sure it’s got what you need. Things like survey creation, analytics that incorporate trend identification, and insightful reports with easily shareable formats. AI-powered tools really come into their own in the time and energy-saving across the whole process.
- Data quality: You can’t get good insights from bad data. You need to assess the reliability and accuracy of the data your market research software uses. Dig into how the data is gathered and the level of vetting used by the tool. If you’re commissioning a survey, is there a diverse panel of participants? If you’re getting into competitor analysis, how credible are the secondary sources it uses? You need a market research tool with a solid reputation for using consistently high-quality data.
- Integration with your tech stack: You need a market research tool that plays well with others. Otherwise, all your data is stuck on one software platform, making it difficult to share insights across your organisation.
Product development, sales, marketing, C-suite – they all need to be able to access this valuable information without the faff of manually exporting statistics, or remaking reports in more shareable formats. Check that the market research tools on your shortlist integrate with your existing CRM and other software.
- Scalability: Is this tool just for where your business is right now? Or does it have the capacity to support your business as it grows? It’s better to invest in a tool that’s got scalability built in.
- Customer support: Will help be there when you need it, in the way you prefer? Check out if there are multiple ways to ask questions; phone, live chat, and email. Have a look at reviews and testimonials to see how well-informed support staff are and how quickly issues are resolved. It’s also a good sign if there’s a wealth of free online resources to scaffold your learning as a new user.
Maybe you’ll discover that you need to combine a couple of different tools to get the richest insights. Like using a specific survey tool alongside an SEO analysis tool, to understand both qualitative and quantitative aspects of market trends.
Understanding data privacy in B2B market research
Your audience is likely to be hyper-aware of online security. You can show your commitment to ethical data collection by explicitly stating how you – and any tool you use – are fully compliant with data privacy regulations, as they apply to market research.
Of course, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Legal regulations like Data Protection Act (2018), Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (2003), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (2018) are complicated and often updated.
You need to make sure you interpret how you’re complying with regulations in terms of the type of research data you’re collecting and the geographical location. Different countries will have their own laws you’ll need to understand in detail.
If your audience can see that you’re doing everything possible to protect their data and privacy, they’ll be much more willing respondents – and trusting customers.
1. ScoreApp
ScoreApp is a quiz and assessment tool to help you collect invaluable insights from your audience through interactive Scorecards.
Features include:
- Quiz creation and customisation: You can quickly create quizzes with ScoreApp’s AI-powered tool, using ready-built templates or the custom option. You can add unlimited questions of different types that have flexible category scoring for tailored feedback. Your market research ScoreApp quizzes are clickable, shareable, and give genuine value to your audience.
- Data analysis and visualisation: Score summaries are presented in clear charts that make sharing insights more accessible.
- Integrations: Your ScoreApp quiz software is designed to integrate smoothly with popular CRMs and Zapier.
- Landing Page Builder: Create beautiful landing pages with ScoreApp’s customisable templates. You can build multiple pages for A/B testing and audience segmentation.
- Data goldmine: You get in-depth insights from the variety and volume of data you can gather through ScoreApp quizzes. Category scores, overall scores, location of respondents, completion times, abandonment statistics, answer history – and more!
All of these invaluable nuggets are analysed and organised for you into individual and aggregate reports. So you can focus on how to use the insights to improve marketing strategies, product development and customer satisfaction.
Star quality: With ScoreApp, you gather data on customer needs, challenges, and preferences – everything you need to understand how your customers think and feel about your product or service.
This powerful knowledge boosts your lead generation efforts and informs customer-centric decisions throughout your organisation.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform that specialises in B2B SEO and competitor analysis. It helps you uncover competitor strategies, industry trends, and keyword opportunities.
Features include:
- Site explorer: Provides in-depth analysis of website traffic and backlink profiles. You can analyse organic search traffic, top pages, and content performance.
- Keywords explorer: A powerful tool for keyword research that covers search volume, keyword difficulty, and click-through rates, and even breaks down results by geographic regions.
- Content explorer: Helps you find content ideas and analyse the most popular content on any topic based on social shares, backlinks, and organic traffic.
- Rank tracker: Monitors website rankings for chosen keywords over time, giving insight into SEO performance.
- Site audit: Evaluates a website’s health by identifying technical SEO issues, such as broken links, slow-loading pages, and other issues affecting site performance.
- Alerts: Sends notifications about backlink changes, keyword ranking updates, and mentions of brands or target keywords.
Star quality: Ahrefs is particularly helpful for market research on what topics or content are performing well in a specific niche. So you can use this data to inform more compelling content strategies.
3. Google Trends
Google Trends is an invaluable tool for market research and SEO strategy, especially for businesses that want to stay ahead of the game.
Features include:
- Insight into search behaviour: Google Trends allows you to analyse the popularity of search terms over time, providing a clear picture of how interest in products, services, or topics changes. This information is essential for gauging seasonal demand and planning marketing strategies accordingly.
- Market demand analysis: You can leverage Google Trends to assess demand for your services, identify rising industry trends, and monitor interest in competitors. This is a goldmine of information about what your target market is actively searching for. So your product development and marketing department teams can use these insights to make confident, data-based decisions.
- Comparison of search terms: By comparing different keywords, brands, or topics, you can see which terms have more traction and adjust your content strategies or product offerings accordingly.
- Trend prediction: Google Trends highlights terms that are trending on a daily, weekly, or even hourly basis. So you can incorporate upcoming trends into product launches and seasonal campaigns.
- Social and search behaviour snapshot: Google Trends aggregates data from Google’s vast search network, providing a holistic view that combines social media signals and search engine behaviour. Not all social media tracking tools can do this! So you get a complete snapshot of public interest, industry opinions and current events.
Star quality: This combination of features helps you optimise your digital marketing, gauge the demand for your product or service, and get a deeper understanding of your target audience.
4. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a comprehensive database of B2B contact and company data. It drives your sales, marketing, and recruiting teams with rich insights and tools for targeting, lead generation, and automation.
Features include:
- Comprehensive B2B database: ZoomInfo’s extensive database includes detailed company and contact information, enriched with firmographic (e.g.industry, company size) and technographic data (e.g. software used by the target company). This enables precise targeting of ideal customers, making it a powerful resource for your marketing and sales teams.
- Real-time data updates: ZoomInfo’s data is continuously updated in real-time, so you have the most up-to-date information. You can stay agile to changes in company ownership, personnel and any other developments that impact your target market.
- AI-powered insights: ZoomInfo uses AI and machine learning to generate powerful insights like predictive analytics, trend forecasts, and lead prioritisation at speed.
- Automated workflows: Ditch the repetition and focus on closing deals. ZoomInfo includes automation capabilities that streamline tasks like lead enrichment, data cleansing, notifications, and outreach.
- CRM integration: ZoomInfo integrates seamlessly with popular CRM systems and SaaS tools, allowing for smooth data synchronisation and workflow continuity.
Star quality: You can identify key decision-makers, understand company hierarchies, and use market and industry insights for better-targeted outreach
5. G2
G2 is a B2B review platform that collates information from user reviews, social data and other online sources. The G2 algorithm assigns each product a standardised score, so you can compare within the same category.
Features include:
- Review search: You can search for reviews based on specific criteria, so you can get to the most relevant information quickly.
- Product content: You get detailed product descriptions, key features, and user-submitted reviews all in one place.
- Research reports: In-depth, data-driven reports that analyse market trends, performance metrics, and comparative insights among competing products – all the juicy info you need to make a confident purchase.
- Category and product taxonomy: A structured classification system that organises products and services into categories and subcategories, making it easy for you to navigate the platform and locate the type of service or product you need.
- Service provider profiles: Dedicated profiles for service providers, featuring information about their offerings, key statistics, and customer reviews, giving potential customers a comprehensive view of each provider – and you a rounded picture of the competition!
Star quality: G2 is brilliant for researching competitors, understanding alternative industry solutions, and seeing how real customers actually feel about their current B2B SaaS tools and those they’re considering.
6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool within LinkedIn, tailored for sales professionals, business developers, and marketers. It offers advanced features to help users find, connect with, and engage potential leads, fostering relationship-building and accelerating sales.
Features include:
- Custom lists: You can create tailored lists to track leads and focus on high-priority accounts.
- Event alerts: You get alerts as soon as there’s a significant change for any of your saved leads and accounts. Knowing about things like job changes and news mentions means you’re always in the right place, at the right time, with exactly the right thing.
- Lead profiles: Lead Profiles provide detailed information on each prospect, including mutual connections, shared interests, and relevant career details.
- Account map: The Account Map visually represents the internal structure of a target account, so you can see key decision-makers, build a buyer circle, and spot any gaps in your outreach strategy. This is essential for multi-stakeholder sales, where understanding the organisational landscape influences your sales approach.
Star quality: It’s a B2B market research tool that’s focused on prospect research and lead generation – great for identifying target audiences and tracking B2B industry trends.
7. Statista
Statista gives you access to detailed market reports, statistics, and forecasts across various industries. As a B2B business, you can use it to gather data on market trends, industry benchmarks, and competitive analysis, which are essential for strategy development and positioning.
Features include:
- Huge database: Data across 150+ countries and 170 industries. 1 million+ statistics on 80,000+ topics.
- Library of industry reports: You get access to 20,000 industry reports that dive into different industries, market size, revenue forecasts and trends.
- Analysis and communication: You can analyse key market validation information like company performance and consumer behaviour, and choose how to see these insights from a variety of infographics and custom charts.
Star quality: The visuals. Statista summarises insights from all the data into easy-to-understand, shareable graphs. It’s great for getting data on multiple topics across a broad range of industries and locations.
8. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a well-known tool for creating custom market research surveys quickly and easily. For B2B businesses, it can be used to gather feedback from clients, understand market needs, and assess customer satisfaction.
It’s also useful for testing new product ideas and improving services by understanding industry-specific pain points.
Features include:
- Creation and management: Selection of ready-to-use templates, multiple question types and simple drag-and-drop design. All customisable to look like you!
- Distribution: Multilingual functionality, multimedia support and Branching/Skip Logic for conditional question paths.
- Analysis and insights: Real-time reporting and analytics with segmentation and trend analysis. BI tools integration and data exporting options to keep communication smooth. Levels of permission include role-based and access and audit trails.
Star quality: The customisation of your surveys to exactly match your audience, with different sized packages to suit a variety of business sizes.
9. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an advanced market research tool you can use to gain a deeper understanding of your B2B audiences, monitor their behaviours and uncover market trends.
Features include:
- Project type: There are over 30 pre-built project templates to get off to a flying start, or you can design your own with Qualtrics advanced logic and a range of question types.
- Insights management: You can store the analytics from your market research studies and use Qualtrics AI-powered search tool to access it as part of future projects.
- Research methodologies: You can go in-depth with qualitative and quantitative research techniques, like video diary studies, conversational surveys, and video feedback.
Star quality: Qualtrics’ extensive set of features is perfect for complex B2B market research.
Conduct useful market research for your B2B company with ScoreApp
The value of gathering data is defined by what you do with it. ScoreApp’s market research capability helps challenge your intuition and tell transformational stories with its actionable insights.
Mitigate the risks of your ‘next big thing’ by informing your decisions with robust data that gets you inside the heads of your audience, benchmarks you against your competitors, and gives you a broad lens on your industry and wider economic environment.
And there isn’t any risk involved – try it for free!
