The 10 Best Market Research Tools for Startups to Use in 2024

Over the last 10 years, the collective market worth of startups has grown by 239%! How can you join the elite club of unicorns and get your slice of this pie? In business, success is a combination of great ideas, talented people, wise decision-making, strategic execution, and a bit of luck. By leveraging market research tools for startups, you increase your chances of turning your vision into reality. Successfully!

Market research tools for startups can significantly speed up gathering and analyzing essential market data. They provide valuable market insights, including customer behavior, target audiences, industry-specific trends, competitor strategies, and more, helping startups successfully navigate the competitive landscape.

Startups are not corporations.

Because of their innovative and agile nature, they need quick and actionable insights that can be accessed with a few clicks rather than a comprehensive understanding that requires extensive time and analysis.

Therefore, startups conducting market research must focus on efficiency and simplicity. Such organizations require tools that are flexible, fast, and easy to use.

And that’s why you’re here, right?

If so, I have good news – you couldn’t find a better article!

Without further ado, let’s dive into the list of top market research software for startups!

Top Market Research Tools for Startups

01 Brand24 – best for real-time social media monitoring and tracking brand mentions

Free 14-day trial.

I will start our list with my favorite market research tool for startups – Brand24.

This AI-powered media monitoring software allows you to track and analyze brand & industry mentions across multiple online sources, including:

• All the major social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitch, and Telegram;
• Non-social sources – news sites, blogs, video platforms, podcasts, newsletters, and review sites.

One of Brand24’s core traits is its AI-backed sentiment analysis, which automatically discovers and categorizes people’s emotions regarding your brand, industry trends, hashtags, and any other keyword you define.

Okay, and how can Brand24 streamline your process of conducting market research?

The tool allows you to create and track multiple projects, allowing you to analyze your own and your competitors’ performance.

To avoid theoretical blah-blah-blah, I decided to show it to you in a real-life example.

I created a project for Garmin – my favorite brand that produces and sells sports smartwatches.

The first step I should take is to find the brand’s top competitors. And the fastest way to do this is to ask the AI Brand Assistant. It’s a chatbot that works like ChatGPT but much better. Why?

Because Brand Assistant has something other chatboxes don’t – access to all the internal data collected for your project!

This one but significant thing allows you to receive personalized insights no other tool would provide and perform detailed brand research.

So, after asking Brand Assistant about Garmin’s top competitors, it replied that the most significant are Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit.

Of course, a Brand Assistant can answer much more detailed and deeper questions.

Here are some sample prompts you can ask the Brand Assistant to perform market research for startups:

• What are the current trends in my industry?
• What is the demographic of the target market for my product/service?
• What are the purchasing behaviors of the target market for my product/service?
• How does my competitor position their brand in the market?
• What are the common pricing strategies in my business niche?
• What are the most effective marketing strategies and channels for reaching the target market?

Next, when we know our competitors, it’s time to gather and analyze more detailed information.

The Compare Projects feature allows you to juxtapose two or more brands. This enables you to do a thorough competitor analysis and see your brand performance relative to your niche rivals.

Look at the table below.

As you can see, Garmin and Apple Watch go head-to-head. While Garmin generally receives more total mentions, Apple Watch has the advantage in terms of reach.

The conclusion? Garmin should focus more on social media posts to increase brand visibility.

I could write much more about Brand24’s awesome market research features, but it’s time to move on!

Key features:

• AI Brand Assistant
• Sentiment Analysis
• AI Topic Analysis
• Compare Projects
• Compare Periods
• Presence Score
• Social media monitoring
• Non-social sources monitoring
• Share of Voice
• Personalized reports

02 Semrush – for competitive analysis and SEO insights

At its core, Semrush is a digital marketing tool primarily focused on SEO insights and analytics.

However, Semrush has evolved into a multipurpose platform that goes far beyond search engine optimization.

If you want to use it to conduct thorough market research, the tool offers a variety of features and functions. The most important one is Market Explorer.

Using traffic measures, this Semrush feature allows you to analyze the total size of your market, list key players in that field, calculate your market share, and map the competitive landscape in your niche.

Additionally, you can compare your domain audience demography with the average market audience.

As stated above, Semrush is mainly an SEO tool, and its capabilities, in that matter, are really helpful to conduct market research.

Traffic Analytics provides in-depth website traffic insights. It lets you track your competitors’ traffic, understand visit behavior, and identify traffic sources.

You can use the data to learn from competitor strategies and improve yours.

Key features:

• Market Explorer
• Traffic Analytics
• Target Audience Analytics
• Market Geo Distribution
• Socialeconomics of a target market

03 Google Trends – for tracking and analyzing search trends

Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to track the popularity of search terms over time.

How could it help you in your market research?

By analyzing search volume, you can discover the demand for your products or services in different parts of the world or during specific periods (i.e., seasonal spikes in popularity).

Such data-driven insights can help you plan logistics, adjust your marketing strategies, or update your products (e.g., adding a new language version).

Moreover, Google Trends allows you to perform competitor research very quickly.

Just insert your competitor’s name in the “+Add comparison” box, check the interest over time, compare the breakdown by region, and more.

Besides, you can check which keywords generated the most interest among your or your competitors’ customers in a given period.

You can also use Google Trends to predict market trends and manage your content strategy.

As for free market research for startup software, it offers a lot!

Key features:

• Search term popularity over time
• Comparison of search terms
• Geographic interest by region
• Related topics and queries
• Real-time data about trends and queries
• Historical data collection

04 Similarweb – for website traffic and consumer insights

Similarweb is another helpful tool for collecting market research data.

It provides insights into website and app traffic, helping evaluate market size and discover detailed insights about people’s behavior on your competitors’ sites.

With Similarweb, you can analyze your industry, see how traffic changes among competitors, and use a special matrix to determine the top players in your niche.

The tool also lets you check what your customers and your competitors’ customers like, how they move through the sales process, and how loyal they are to different brands.

For website traffic, Similarweb helps you measure key engagement metrics like how long people stay on a site, how many pages they visit, and how often they leave quickly. This helps you understand how well a site keeps visitors’ attention.

I also like that you can focus only on the important parts of a website by filtering out the rest.

Any downsides? Some users say that the data Similarweb collects can sometimes be inaccurate.

Key features:

• Keyword trends
• Traffic and engagement metrics
• Advanced audience insights
• Industry trends
• Mobile app analytics

05 BuzzSumo – for content performance and industry trends

Startups must be present online – that’s pretty obvious. But how can they cut through the noise and make people notice them?

BuzzSumo is a great tool for that purpose! It’s a content research software that helps you find out what’s popular right now and which topics are getting the most attention.

With BuzzSumo, you can discover what kind of content your target audience is engaging with, see what your competitors are sharing, and identify key influencers in your industry to build a competitive advantage.

And it’s not only about text content. The tool’s Content Discovery & Content Research features allow you to explore popular videos, infographics, and other trending media types.

As BuzzSumo is also public relations software, you can use it to discover niche-relevant journalists and establish ties with them. However, this feature is extra-paid and requires purchasing a higher subscription plan.

Key features:

• Content Research
• Content Discovery
• Content competitive analysis
• Trending topics discovery
• Basic media mentions monitoring

06 Statista – for industry statistics and market data

I bet you have been on the Statista website at least once in your life.

It’s an online platform that provides access to a huge collection of statistics, data, and reports covering nearly endless topics and industries.

Statista aggregates data from over 22,000 sources and presents it in easy-to-understand charts, graphs, and infographics.

This makes it an essential source of information not only for startups but also for huge companies, researchers, educators, and individuals in need of reliable information for market analysis, forecasting & identifying trends, and decision-making.

So, if you need deeper insights into your industry, consumer behavior, or global market trends, Statista is the tool that can provide you with the data you need – with one important caveat.

The tool is based on secondary data. Therefore, it’s always better to double-check the information that is essential for your business decisions. Trust, but verify.

Key features:

• Extensive database of stats, data, reports, graphs, and infographics
• Detailed market reports
• Interactive data visualization
• Industry & company insights
• API integration

07 Answer the Public – for visualizing customer queries and interests

Answer the Public is a handy SEO tool for anyone wanting to uncover what their potential customers are asking about online.

The tool visualizes search queries, helping you see exactly what people are interested in. This allows you to tailor your content and products to meet real customer preferences.

Technically, Answer the Public gathers data from search engines and presents them in a visual map, showing the most common questions and concerns about your company, competitors, or industry.

How can startups benefit from this tool?

Used properly, Answer the Public allows you to identify market trends quickly, discover what matters most to your audience, and refine your communication strategy.

Key features:

• Visual representation of customer queries
• Insights into trending questions
• Content inspiration to create targeted marketing messaging
• CPC estimations
• Search behavior comparison

08 SurveyMonkey – for creating surveys and gathering feedback

It’s not a secret knowledge that gathering primary data is one of the best market research methods. And here, SurveyMonkey enters the stage.

SurveyMonkey is an AI-boosted tool for startups that need to do primary market research and gather insights directly from their focus groups.

It allows you to create, distribute, and analyze surveys quickly and easily, helping you understand your prospects and existing customers’ preferences, satisfaction, and needs.

So, SurveyMonkey allows you to collect valuable data about your specific market dynamics and analyze the results in real time.

Such primary research is absolutely crucial for startups looking to refine their products, improve customer service, adjust business strategy, or validate new ideas.

What about AI?

Well, the tool created the artificial intelligence assistant called SurveyMonkey Genius.

It can create a survey from a prompt, score your survey, and give recommendations to make it even more accurate for your market research purposes.

Key features:

• Easy survey creation and distribution
• Customizable survey templates
• Survey recipients’ segmentation
• AI SurveyMonkey Genius

09 Tableau – for visualizing and analyzing complex data sets

The market research process generates a lot of data. Digging through them might be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Therefore, you need a tool to organize it into a more digestible form.

Moreover, by turning raw data into clear graphs and charts, you can easily spot patterns and identify trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to Tableau.

Tableau is a data visualization tool perfect for startups needing to make sense of complex market data.

It allows you to create interactive and shareable dashboards, turning raw data into visual insights that are easy to understand.

Tableau’s customization options enable you to tailor your dashboards to focus on the metrics that matter most to your startup.

Whether you need to track KPIs, compare market segments, or present data to stakeholders, the tool gives you the flexibility to design visuals that will meet your specific market research goals.

The huge strength of Tableau is its drag-and-drop interface. With it, you can quickly build dashboards that provide real-time insights, helping you stay agile and responsive to market changes.

Key features:

• Interactive data visualization
• Real-time analytics
• Easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface
• Shareable dashboards
• Integrates with multiple data sources

10 Make My Persona – for creating detailed customer personas

Make My Persona is a free tool belonging to HubSpot’s suite of marketing tools that helps you create detailed buyer personas for your business.

Why should you even care? And what’s the point of creating buyer personas for market research?

Well, creating personas is like building a roadmap to understand your customers better so you can serve them better, which is key to growing your startup.

Makes My Persona guides you through the process of building these personas step by step.

It asks you the right questions about your ideal customers, such as their age, job, interests, and challenges, so you can create a clear and detailed profile of who they are.

Then, Makes My Persona generates a personalized, easy-to-use template to refer to whenever you launch a new marketing campaign.

This ensures your efforts are always in line with the needs and preferences of your ideal customers, making your marketing more focused and effective.

Key features:

• Customizable Persona Templates
• Easy download and share
• User-friendly process of creating buyer personas

Conclusion

I personally tested all the tools on the list – from Brand24 and its impressive media monitoring capabilities to Makes My Persona’s intuitive persona-building process – and recommend them with all my heart!

These tools provide the data and insights that truly streamline your market research process. They help you understand your business niche, competitors, audience, industry trends, and more.

Of course, no tool will replace human creativity and strategic thinking. But that’s exactly what these tools are for.

They free up your time from boring & time-consuming tasks so you can focus on what’s really important – driving innovation, making strategic plans, and leading your startup to the gate of success.

Good luck!

Final thoughts:

• Thorough research is crucial for avoiding common startup mistakes, like poor product-market fit and wrong marketing strategies.
• Modern market research tools like Brand24 have implemented AI features that streamline the whole process.
• While no tool can replace your creativity and strategic thinking, properly used market research time can free you from boring and time-consuming tasks.

Looking for a top market research tool for your startup? Your search is over! Test Brand24 for free and check by yourself how it will change your life for the better!