One piece of entrepreneurship advice you’ll hear all the time: “Know your audience.” With marketplaces today becoming more saturated and competitive, this advice is more important than ever. 

Deeply understanding your target market is the key to surviving in a competitive environment. Conducting audience research allows you to create better products and offer more targeted services to satisfy your customer’s needs – so that they don’t have to turn to the competition.

There are so many audience research tools out there that it’s often hard to know which to choose. You’ll want a tool that’s intuitive, affordable, and gathers accurate information quickly.

Below, we’ve compiled the top seven audience research tools that fit these criteria. These tools will help you understand and cater to your market niche effectively. 

1. Wynter

Features

• Conduct messaging, preference, or email tests with B2B audiences to get into their heads
• Send out buyer intelligence surveys to understand what your ICP thinks of your product
• Get video recordings of B2B users reviewing your website or sales funnel
• Conduct live interviews with potential customers to get more specific and direct feedback
• Reach panelists who are all verified manually through LinkedIn

Pricing

Pay-as-you-go testing starts at $899 per test. You can also opt for their monthly subscription plans at $999 per month or $1584 per month annually.

2. PickFu

Not to be biased 😉 – but PickFu is a great audience research software for getting reliable feedback from the right people. It’s better than social media polls or online survey forms (e.g., Typeform or SurveyMonkey) because you can customize respondents so only people within your target audience can answer. And don’t have to worry about recruiting people to respond. We’ve got that covered.

PickFu uses both qualitative and quantitative types of market research to provide you with accurate business intelligence: quantitative by polling to gather numerical data, and qualitative by asking respondents to share the “why” behind their choices.

Features

Some notable features to help unlock your market niche include the following:

• The PickFu Panel has over 15 million respondents and the ability to segment based on 90+ demographics, including age range, gender identity, job title, personal income range, credit score, etc.
• Head-To-Head polls for when you need to compare two options (such as two product designs or two color schemes).
• Ranked polls for comparing three or more options at once. Respondents rank them in order of preference.
• Screen Recordings to watch how respondents interact with your website, app, or product listing. This makes for more transparent and in-depth answers.
• Ability to poll up to 500 people at a time.
• PickFu for marketing: polling helps marketers with decisions like validating product designs, reviewing websites, testing ads, choosing a logo, etc.
• PickFu for e-commerce: If you’re an Amazon FBA or e-commerce marketplace seller, PickFu is for you. It can help you discover products to sell, test product ideas, refine product designs, and test different elements (like packaging or brand name) for a successful launch.
• PickFu for enterprise companies: It’s costly (both financially and time-wise) for large or enterprise companies to make wrong moves. But with PickFu, you can get the data you need to make smart decisions. It also integrates with your existing suite of tools to make data analysis more efficient. 
• PickFu for book publishing: Polls can provide valuable publishing insights, like choosing the best book cover, title, and description copy to drive sales.

Pricing

It’s free to sign up for PickFu, and there’s always an option to pay as you go, meaning you pay only for the polls you run – starting at just $1 per response. There are also subscription plans that offer discounts on each poll: $79/month ($0.95 per response) and $299/month ($0.90 per response.)

If you’re an enterprise company, fill out our form for a customized plan. You can also buy prepaid credit to save more money.

3. Sparktoro

Sparktoro helps marketers discover what their audience does online. This includes the websites they visit, who they follow on social media, and the topics they talk about. You can use these consumer insights to create great SEO content, build buyer personas, and find PR opportunities.

It gathers information from 12 social networks and is a favorite among marketers who need actionable insights but don’t want to run polls.

Features

• Demographics of your audience, including roles, employer industries, and years of experience
• Hashtags, words in bio, and phrases or search terms your target audience uses
• Sites, accounts, and channels they engage with
• Ability to create lists to get more organized, which you can export and filter
• Custom audience if you want to analyze 5,000-100,000 social URLs

Pricing

Sparktoro runs a subscription plan with more features and monthly searches the higher up the payment ladder you go. But it has a free plan with only 20 searches per month, which is great for testing its functionality.

4. Glimpse

Glimpse is great for understanding consumer behavior and identifying market trends. Google Trends offers the basic data; since it’s a free data collection tool, you can use it for free market research. Glimpse builds on the raw Google Trends data and gives a more detailed breakdown.

Features

• Glimpse is useful for e-commerce folks as it helps them uncover the fastest-growing products to sell. It has a Google Shopping report tab containing organic results for e-commerce and drop-shipping stores. You can strategically include the keywords you find into your feed’s product descriptions, titles, and images alt text. There are also similar tabs for Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart.
• It includes helpful data visualization, generating visual graphs that show trends over time. This could inform new product development for startups.
• Glimpse includes the top questions your target audience is asking to support keyword research, which helps with content marketing efforts and ranking on search engines.
• Get information on what consumers search for on different channels and key features they want you to offer.
• Glimpse tracks popularity and movements of keywords to gauge market size and buying habits.

Pricing

Glimpse has three pricing tiers: Hobbyist, the free plan; Professional at $49 per month, and Expert at $249 per month. 

Combine this tool with PickFu, and you have everything you need for conducting fast, cost-effective market research.

5. Audiense

As the name suggests, Audiense is a social audience tool. It provides in-depth social data and a breakdown of your audience. You can use these customer insights for influencer marketing and other types of digital marketing campaigns.

The drawback to this tool is it mainly uses data from Twitter/X and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), which is limiting. PickFu takes an alternative approach — getting valuable insights from people, regardless of their social media platform.

Features

• The audience breakdown includes audience or market segmentation, conversations the segments have, and influencers people in the segments follow.
• Soprism (a recent acquisition) provides and analyzes audience insights from Meta.
• Twitter analytics to know your Twitter audience better and create a marketing strategy.
• Great data foundation to develop personas.
• Demand intelligence to determine the level of demand a term has.

Pricing

Audiense offers two solutions: audience intelligence and Twitter marketing. The pricing for most of their tools is available on demand, but Audiense Insights and Audiense Connect have a monthly subscription of £1199/month and £39/month, respectively.

6. Qualroo

With Qualroo, you can get quick, real-time feedback from your website or app users. It nudges them to fill out a survey at the right moment. To set up Qualroo, you’ll need to embed a setup code on your website.

Features

• AI sentiment analysis to analyze feedback on your behalf
• Ability to create your questions or choose from their template
• Skip logic that changes a respondent’s question based on how they answer the previous question
• A/B testing for marketing, product, and customer service teams
• Integrates with platforms like Slack, Zapier, Hubspot CRMs, and Google Analytics

Pricing

There are three categories: Contextual Surveys, Email Surveys, and Contextual + Email Surveys. All categories have a monthly and yearly plan. 

7. Userlytics

User friendliness is one element every product should aspire to, and Userlytics helps with that. A UX research platform, it offers an effective way for companies to test various elements of their tools and how intuitive they are.

Features

• Global survey panel of almost two million humans to review your product
• ULX score, which measures 18 user experience attributes to show you how usable your product is
• Over 20 languages supported to write questions and test instructions
• Multi-channel testing functionality
• Different types of research methods, including qualitative and quantitative

Pricing

• Enterprise: Select your yearly budget to determine enterprise cost. They offer a customized package for a budget of $60,000-500,000.
• Limitless: Available on request and suitable for those with unlimited accounts or who want unlimited concurrent testing per account.
• Custom: This allows you to select the features you want, and your selections will determine the price.

Unlock your market niche with these market research tools

Audience research is the foundation of all successful business and marketing strategies. The more you understand your audience, the better you can serve them. There’s often a disconnect between how you see your product and how your customers see it, but research helps bridge this gap.

Market research has many use cases across different sectors. For instance, it can help find the right topic for podcasts, create backlink strategies, or discover the most effective content formats for distribution. 

With the tools listed here, you can understand crucial metrics about your audience, like their preferences and behaviors. Ultimately, these insights will help grow your business to command a significant market share.

If you’d like to hear directly from your ideal customer, try PickFu. It’s free to sign up and polls start at $1 per response.

Get started with your target audience research!

FAQs

What’s a quick way to do audience research?

Conducting a poll. This is as quick and easy as audience research can get since you can obtain results in minutes. To conduct an effective poll, write simple, specific questions with limited options, then send them to the right people to answer. PickFu can help you reach your target audience and poll them. 

What is the difference between audience research and audience analysis?

Audience research and audience analysis happen at different stages of the market research process. Audience research gathers information about your audience via polls, surveys, interviews, etc., while audience analysis is the interpretation of the data you’ve collected. Both steps are important and should inform your decision-making.

What are the benefits of audience research tools?

With audience research tools, more and more businesses can now research their products. It’s because these tools make market research cost-effective, provide accurate and relevant data, save time, and offer real-time feedback.