Feel Like Sherlock Holmes with These 9 Free Marketing Research Tools
Get ready to solve some online mysteries with these 9 free marketing research tools.
When is the last time you solved a mystery? I'm not talking about stolen gems or murder, I'm talking about marketing mysteries. For example:
How Long Did it Take for Your Competitors to Grow their Site?
What Strategies Work Well for Growing Audiences in Your Industry?
What's more popular, boxers or briefs?
These are the hard-hitting questions that can be solved using the free marketing tools below.
I've used all of these amazing tools to do research and solve many mini-mysteries for clients and companies, and I think you’ll find them to be incredibly helpful.
So grab your magnifying glass, here are 9 free marketing research tools.
9 Free Marketing Research Tools Video Tutorial
In this video tutorial, I cover all of the marketing research tools listed in this article. These are the best marketing research tools that I know of, but if you have any favorites, please share in the comments below.
9 Free Marketing Research Tools
Here's the list. All of these tools are elementary my dear Watson.
1. Google Trends
Quick Snapshot: See Search Trends
Type: Website
Google Trends is the tool I use the most from this list. The tool essentially allows you to see search history over time for specific keywords in both Google Search and YouTube Search.
All you have to do is type in a word, or series of words, to see how search for a specific topic is trending.
You can also compare two search terms which is incredibly powerful for legitimately testing where a specific keyword or marketing stands in the world of online search.
For example, if a person in a suit says:
'We should move our budget because Tik Tok it is more popular than Instagram.'
You can actually test that assumption with data.
With a quick search you can learn that the answer to that assumption is, no, TikTok is not more popular than Instagram. In fact, searches for Instagram have grown more than TikTok starting on March 12. I wonder why?...
2. Hunter.io
Quick Snapshot: Find Any Email Address
Type: Website & Extension
Hunter.io is an incredible tool that allows you to get the email address of basically anybody in the world. It works by scanning the internet for any mention of email addresses associated with a certain domain.
Once it finds a result, it estimates what the other emails at that company are like.
That's already pretty cool, but when you pair it with LinkedIn you now have a power couple.
Let me explain.
Scenario: You need the email address for the marketing director of a company you'd like to collaborate with.
Step 1: Find Them on LinkedIn
Just go to that company page on LinkedIn and find the person you are looking for.
Step 3: Send Them a Kind Non-Salesy Email
Send them a very inviting and non-salesy email. Here's a quick template:
Hi Sarah,
My name is Joe, I’m a Marketing Coordinator with GreenPalm Fitness.
We connect health-conscious LA residents by hosting local fitness meetups around the city.
I’m curious if your company would be interested in partnering up to do a fun promotion for the fitness community. Are you responsible for coordinating promotions at Meditation Oasis?
If so, could we set up a call?
If not, could you put me in touch with the right person?
I really appreciate the help!
Best,
Joe Shmoe
Feel free to steal that email template, and bonus points if your name is Joe Shmoe and you work at GreenPalm Fitness.
Step 4: Become Best Friends
This part is easy. Stay up late talking about your favorite hobbies, gossip about the other kids at school, collaborate on marketing campaigns... you know, friend stuff.
This is my go-to tool when I'm trying to contact folks for everything including finding emails for content partnerships and podcast bookings, but you can definitely use it for doing boring stuff like lead generation for sales.
3. SimilarWeb
Quick Snapshot: See Traffic, Referral Sources, Audience Breakdowns, and Similar Sites
Type: Website and Extension
Similarweb is probably the most robust research tool on this list. I'm honestly shocked at the amount of data that they give away for free.
Instead of explaining what it does I’d like to create a scenario for you.
Scenario: Let's say you want to start a modern luxury fashion brand that targets middle-class millennials.
Neat! Let's do some research on a major player in that space to see how they are doing.
Rankings:
You can see how the website traffic ranks globally, by country, and by category.
Visits Over Time:
You can see a chart of estimated visits over time. The key word there is estimated, the data is not exact, but it's generally not too far off.
Traffic by Countries:
What country do they do business in? Are they growing? This is helpful for doing paid ad targeting.
Traffic Sources:
How do people find their website? Is it primarily through search? direct (sometimes misidentified as email)? social? This can tell you how to prioritize your marketing efforts.
Refferals:
What are the sites that send traffic to this company's web page?
Search:
What keywords are leading customers to their website? What percentage is paid advertising vs. organic?
Note: Organic traffic is clicks to a website that come from search results like Google.
Social:
What social channels drive the most traffic to their website.?
Display Advertising:
What networks is this company advertising on? What publishers drive the most traffic?
Audience Interest:
What audience is this company targeting? What websites does this audience like to target?
This feature is gold for figuring out partners for giveaways!
Competitors and Similar Sites:
Who is competing with this company? Is there a lot of real competition? Maybe there’s an opportunity?
The Comparison Tool:
Using the comparison tool at the top you can also compare two different companies against each other.
As you can see, just using the free tools above, we can create a very quick marketing plan for our fictitious business based on the findings.
Quick Findings for Mejuri Competitor:
Their traffic severely increases during the holidays.
Users visit their site for a short amount of time.
However, they visit many pages during that visit.
The United States and Canada is the best country to target.
Search marketing should be the #1 priority.
Direct marketing would be valuable (Untraceable Origin, Usually Email, Apps, and shortened URLs).
Referral traffic is not essential for success.
Earrings are the most popular type of jewelry.
YouTube and Facebook generate the majority of social traffic.
Display networks like ShareASale would be great to use.
YouTube Ads and display ads on news publications are a great marketing tool.
Catbirdnyc, artizia, and everlane would be great companies to partner with
Fashion Magazines, Shoes, Food, and Fashion News would be great blog content ideas.
The biggest competitors tend to be larger brands.
All of these hypotheses and conclusions were created just from the Mejuri SimilarWeb page.
Fun Bonus: SimilarWeb also has a free extension for Google Chrome. This is an insanely quick way to do research.
4. Answer the Public
Quick Snapshot: See What People are Searching For
Type: Website
Every website has a niche; a specific topic or area of interest that your audiences loves.
The same is true for your site.
But how are you supposed to know what content to create in your niche? Well my friend... I'd like to introduce you to Answer the Public.
Answer the public is a free tool that allows you to type in a topic and see prepositions, questions, and an alphabetical list of searches related to that topic.
For example, if you had a website dedicated to a love of antique cars you can simply type in 'Antique Cars' into the search box.
This will yield literally hundreds of potential blog ideas and terms.
5. Alexa Ranking
Quick Snapshot: See Company Traffic Rankings
Type: Website and Extension
Alexa is very similar to SimilarWeb. The Amazon-owned tool has been around for longer and surprisingly pre-dates the Alexa voice assistant.
I find the data on Alexa Ranking to be slightly better than SimiliarWeb, but there are less data points to look at on Alexa.
Using Alexa you'll find all the neat features you’d want in a marketing research tool like traffic rankings, search analytics, similar sites, and keyword recommendations.
6. TubeBuddy
Quick Snapshot: Free YouTube Research and Optimization
Type: Website and Extension
Most major brands have a presence on YouTube, and out of all the YouTube tools available to the modern marketer, TubeBuddy is my favorite.
This tool gives you tons of free data like tag recommendations, keyword searches, end-card templates, and a posting checklist.
However, the coolest feature in my opinion, is the channel ‘channelytics’ comparison tool. Not only is it a great pun, but using the tool you can compare channels to determine who is growing and what videos preform best.
This is a great tool for predicting up-and-coming influencers in your niche. I use this tool to figure out key contributors for our blog.
7. Influencer Marketing Hub - Instagram Follower Chart
Quick Snapshot: See Instagram Growth Over Time
Type: Free Tool
Want to see how long it took an influencer to grow their following? Use this free tool from Influencer Marketing Hub. It essentially tracks Instagram growth over time.
For example, if we want to see how the.holistic.psychologist has grown in the last year we can simply type the username into the tool and view the growth.
Now you can take that data and cross-reference it with their social posts to determine the exact reason for the growth.
8. SpyFu
Quick Snapshot: View Search Competition
Type: Website
SpyFu was almost too nerdy to make this list, but the truth is, it is an incredible marketing research tool.
Using SpyFu you can see a VERY detailed snapshot into the search trends for a company. Including the estimated ad budget, clicks, keywords, and more.
Even more, you can see the estimated spend of their keywords. Did your inner accountant just jump for joy?
You can also view the top pages for clicks to their site. This is a great tool for prioritizing certain sections of your website. For example, take a look at this chart:
If I wanted to start a similar online company I would prioritize necklaces, rings and earrings in my navigation.
There are also free tools that allow you to see the most effective ads for that company over time. I'm honestly astounded that this is even legal.
9. Buzzsumo
Quick Snapshot: Social Post Research
Type: Website
Buzzsumo is a tool that allows you to do content research across social media channels. Essentially you can type in a niche and find what posts have performed the best on social.
This is a brilliant way to see what works for your site's topics.
Note: They severely limit the number of searches you can do per month, so be intentional with your search.
Honorable Mention: Google Forms
Quick Snapshot: Survey Your Audience
Type: Online Form Builder
The last free 'tool' that I'd like to mention is Google Forms. This free tool gives you the power to collect data and information from your audience. For example, how do you know if your audience will buy a product? Instead of investing too much time creating and developing in an idea, just ask them with a form.
You should try to always use survey data to help with big product and marketing decisions.
Learn More About Marketing Research
Want to learn more about doing marketing research? Check out these awesome articles:
Free Competitor Analysis Tools - 15 of the very best tools available to you as a marketer, a few of them found their way into this article.
The Best Competitor Analysis Tools - Another great article for researching competitors.
How are These Tools Legal? - A social post we created with some of the same ideas mentioned in this article. It focuses on the great toilet paper shortage of 2020.
We also cover tons of marketing and audience growth tutorials on the blog here at Curious Refuge.
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80 On-Demand Videos
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Get Going Sherlock!
Well, don't stick around here! Go out there and start sleuthing around the web. Who knows what mysteries you may solve?...
