The art of marketing defies easy definition. Anything you do that helps build awareness of your product and brings in customers can be correctly classified as a marketing activity. Under such a broad category, it’s no wonder that technological marketing tools pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Choosing the best solutions in such a crowded field can be difficult.
These tools are helpful for investigating historical and current web technology trends; assisting in lead generation; finding up-to-date keyword statistics; gleaning insights into the collective marketing hive mind; or generally improving your ecommerce marketing. We like to help marketers out, so we’ve chosen twelve marketing research solutions that stand out from the pack.
1. Datanyze
Looking to track where and how far certain applications are spreading across the web? Datanyze can get you the sales intelligence you need. This “technographics” application scours the web daily to see what technology is being adopted (or dropped) by more than 30 million different sites.
With Datanyze, you can learn who’s signing up with your competitors, which new apps are quietly taking over the world of ecommerce, or what tech is suddenly yesterday’s news. Just tell Datanyze what to track, and you’ll get queries and reports that will tell you exactly what’s going on.
Price: starts at $600 per month (standard), $1,200 per month (pro).
2. BuiltWith
Ever visited a website and really wanted to know what it’s made of? Feed a website address to BuiltWith, and it can tell you about the framework, widgets, hosting, scripting, shopping cart software, content delivery and advertising networks, and more.
BuildWith can help you create website profiles, generate leads, keep an eye on your competition, and analyze your markets. It’s an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that can provide reams of useful information for marketers and web developers.
Price: starts at $295 per month (standard), $495 per month (pro), $995 per month (enterprise).
3. SimilarTech
SimilarTech’s flagship product is its Sales Insights Platform, which provides real-time insight into the adoption and usage of web technologies. This helps ecommerce businesses identify trends, generate leads, and gather competitive intelligence.
SimilarTech uses powerful internal algorithms and their data-sharing partnership with traffic and market intelligence site SimilarWeb to scan over 30 billion web pages per month. Their clients are provided with market analysis and presented with undiscovered opportunities.
Price: starts at $290 per month (startup), $12,000 per year (professional), $36,000 per year (premium).
4. Statista
When you wake up to a reminder that you’ve got 24 hours to become an expert on a new market you’re about to break into, you need Statista. It provides market analysis, dossiers, and raw information. Select the market you need to learn about, and Statista serves up the materials you need to get up to speed.
It covers more than 200 markets, ranging across over 170 industries and 80,000 different topics. Statista offers data, surveys, and forecasting sourced from a wide variety of reputable and trustworthy organizations and media outlets.
Price: Free (basic), $49 per month (premium), $650+ per month (corporate).
5. SEMrush
Measuring the efficacy and results of an online marketing campaign can be challenging. You need to organize the many moving parts of your marketing endeavors in a way that allows you to track, measure, and quantify outcomes. Fortunately, SEMrush created a multi-purpose marketing toolkit to help you optimize your marketing channels.
With over 30 different tools for SEO, social media, content creation, and market analysis, this versatile toolkit merits a look from any digital marketing professional.
Price: starts at $99.95 per month per user.
6. ahrefs
You’re struggling to ascend the Google search rankings and overtake your more highly-placed competitors? Whether your issues are with link building, keywords, content creation, or your overall strategy, AhRefs might be the SEO toolkit you’re looking for.
AhRefs does daily web crawls to record and store actionable data, which it hosts and makes readily accessible and searchable to its users. With extensive data on over 150 million keywords, AhRefs should be more than capable of growing your organic search traffic.
Price: starts at $99 per month (lite), $179 per month (standard), $399 per month (advanced), $999 per month (agency).
7. Google Trends
Google the largest battlefield by far when it comes to the war for SEO supremacy. But they’re also big enough to give away pretty powerful analytics tools for free. Google Trends lets you search for keyword data, compare across different regions, and create trend graphs.
Google Trends is a great resource for real-time keyword information. If breaking news is causing a spike in certain searches, you can bet that Google Trends will be on top of it.
Price: Free.
8. Google Keyword Tools
Try as they might, marketers sometimes struggle to get inside the minds of the consumers they’re trying to reach. Fortunately, there’s no better window into the internal workings of today’s ecommerce shoppers than the Google search box. Google is more than happy to help marketers figure out which keywords will bridge the gap between their solutions and the consumers who are looking for them.
Google Keyword Tools will show you data and history for the keywords you’re searching. It will also help you plan an advertising budget by showing you what other marketers are bidding on certain keywords, and develop an overall keyword strategy. Best of all, it’s free!
Price: Free.
9. Quora
Sometimes, the questions you have as a marketer aren’t really answerable by raw data and automated tools. There are times when you need actual human insights into certain questions or problems. Quora isn’t a “software solution” in the traditional sense, but it’s a great place to find real people willing to provide expertise and insights.
Why would anyone give away their professional knowledge for free? Quora is a great place to burnish your credentials and personal brand as a thought leader, so you can find all sorts of legitimate experts there. In fact, you might find that it’s just as advantageous to provide information on Quora as it is to seek it out.
Price: Free.
10. Wonder
Marketers, wouldn’t it be great to have a research assistant in your back pocket? Unfortunately, neither artificial intelligence nor shrink-ray technology are quite up to the task yet. Wonder, however, is ready to step in and provide you with a team of live, on-demand human research assistants for whatever subject you need to learn about.
Wonder boasts experienced researchers, access to over 300 paywalled knowledge databases, and no limits on the scope or subject of your query. It’s ready to spring into action immediately and deliver digestible reports on any topic you need.
Price: starts at $29+ per month.
11. Upwork
As a marketplace for freelancers, Upwork may seem at first blush like a more generalized version of Wonder. However, because Upwork doesn’t specialize in research, you can use it for a much wider range of digital marketing applications.
Upwork is a great place to find content writers, artists, designers, strategists, distributors, social media mavens, and much more. When you need a particular human touch to your marketing efforts but a permanent hire doesn’t make budgetary sense, check out Upwork.
Price: Free (basic), $49.99 per month (plus), $499 per month (business).
12. Facebook Groups
Like Quora, Facebook Groups is a worthwhile and free resource. You can use Facebook Groups to seek out and solicit information, news, and discussions about the topics that matter to your marketing campaign. You can also create spaces where customers, industry colleagues, and influencers can come together to share information and make connections.
Creating a Facebook Group is easy. Nurturing it into a dynamic and thriving space that attracts people who have valuable information and experiences to contribute is another challenge altogether. If you want to establish a stronger presence for your company on Facebook (and you should), Groups are an excellent place to start.
Price: Free.
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing research, you’ll find many great tools and resources at your disposal. You should be able to face the start of your next marketing campaign fully prepared and confident to take on the challenges of tomorrow. There’s a solution out there for practically any marketing need. Find the right tools or resources for the job; get the insights, analytics, and support you need; and go find and convert those leads!
