Marketing Research Tools and Techniques to Drive Brand Wins

Gale de Ocampo

Author & Editor

Content Strategist

Published on: Sep 14, 2023 Updated on: May 31, 2024

Discover marketing research that will drive brand wins when you equip yourself with the best marketing research tools and techniques in the industry right now.

Effective research is every expert’s key to shaping strategies that drive marketing wins. By constantly updating your digital arsenal with the right marketing research techniques and tools, you’ll be able to transform insights into actionable strategies and turn yourself into a better digital marketer for your brand.

Empower yourself with practical tips and insights with the help of this expert guide by the pros at Propelrr. Learn more about exciting tools for data analytics, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, conversion rate (CRO) optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, and more when you check out this list of essential platforms and methodologies.

Ready to embark on a new journey towards business success? Then take a look at this comprehensive guide to discover the best tools and techniques today.

Understanding marketing research fundamentals

Marketing research is the process of collecting and analyzing data about your brand’s audiences and industry in order to make informed decisions that drive business wins. It is used to help marketers understand consumers so that they can analyze issues, identify insights, and strategize for future experiments and executions accordingly.

By conducting studies for your brand, you get to collect data and transform insights into tangible and successful strategies. This is what makes the process so essential to every digital marketer. Without it, you won’t be able to adapt plans to the ever-changing landscape of online promotions, thus resulting in losses for your business.

With these insights about brand research in mind, you can better dive into the various types of tools you’ll need for structuring your data collection and analysis. Read on to learn more from this guide right now.

Exploring essential market research tools

When it comes to collecting data, you’ll definitely want to enact essential techniques such as quantitative or qualitative methods of research, for all your information-gathering and analysis needs.

By utilizing such versatile examples of qualitative research and qualitative research methods like surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and focus group discussions (FGDs), you can gain a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of your audiences - thus improving the quality of your collected audience data.

To gather all this necessary information for your market analysis needs, you’ll need specific tools that can help you scrutinize online audience actions, understand consumer behavior, and manage content creation. You can equip yourself with free or low-cost tools for online analytics, tracking, and management to get your research journey started today.

Here’s a masterlist of indispensable tools that you can use to comprehensively collect data, conduct surveys, run qualitative studies, and more, for all your brand’s digital strategies in the future:

Website analytics

Best used for collecting data on website traffic, usability, and performance, some notable analytics tools you can use for free or for a low cost include:

  • Google Analytics and Looker Studio. The combination of these two essential Google tools will help you track, analyze, and report site traffic effectively - all for low to no extra cost.
  • WebTrends.  This service, on the other hand, allows you to focus on the collection and presentation of website or app user information through log file analysis.
  • Localytics by Upland Software. With the help of their local analytics software, you can identify key drop-off points on your website and formulate targeted push campaigns accordingly.

PPC advertising

Want to study efficient PPC strategies for your business? Here are a couple of accessible tools where you can start your paid advertising journey off on a good note:

  • Google Ads Keyword Planner. Beginner and experienced advertisers alike use Google Ads’ keyword planning tool to gather web traffic statistics on certain keywords for better search ad content performance.
  • AdEspresso by Hootsuite. With this comprehensive software by Hootsuite, you can study, manage, and optimize PPC campaigns across multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google - all in one place.
  • SpyFu. A heavy-hitter in the PPC world, SpyFu allows you to learn from your competitors’ paid ad campaigns by giving you intel on their keywords, ad variations, and more.

SEO

Discover tips and techniques for optimizing your site for search with these quintessential tools for keyword analysis, site crawling, backlink analysis, rank checking, and more:

  • Google Search Console. This essential platform allows you to check your search rankings, review site indexing and structured data, and even process notifications for manual penalties from your website on Google.
  • SEO Site Audit Tool and Backlink Checker by Ahrefs. The combination of these two free tools means you can audit your website, check for broken links, and improve page performance, all in one go.
  • SEO Spider by Screaming Frog. With the help of this charmingly named platform, you can crawl your website efficiently like a spider and check for broken links, points for metadata improvement, and more.

Social media management

Manage and optimize your brand’s social presence with the help of these essential tools for social media analytics and improvement:

  • BuzzSumo. This platform is perfect for social media managers who want to study the effectiveness of their social content. You can use BuzzSumo to track popular topics, follow influencer trends, find relevant keywords, and more.
  • Audiense. Gain an audience-centric understanding of your social media strategies with Audiense. You can use this platform to collect and analyze social affinity data for better consumer segmentation and comprehension.
  • Buffer. An all-in-one social media management platform, Buffer helps you with content strategizing, scheduling, tracking, curating, and more.

Content marketing

Analyze and generate content like a pro when you make use of these indispensable platforms for your content marketing needs today:

  • Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule. Write the best web page content possible with CoSchedule’s headline analyzer. With this free plugin, you can check and rate the effectiveness of your headline to increase meaningful traffic to your website.
  • Google Trends. Want to know what the trendiest topics are around the world right now? Use Google Trends to research content ideas for future marketing campaigns.
  • Curata. Curate your content based on an expert machine learning algorithm with Curata. You can also coordinate content across all your channels with this platform.

CRO

Find the best free or low-cost apps available for all your CRO needs with the help of this quick list:

  • Microsoft Clarity. A free tool for studying user behavior, you can use Microsoft Clarity to optimize your web platform based on session replays and heatmaps.
  • Kissmetrics. This comprehensive app allows you to track every single user interaction on a website, from page click to customer conversion.
  • Optimizely. The last platform on the list, Optimizely, offers a wide range of A/B testing, reporting, and AI-driven segmentation for all your optimization needs.

Given all these essential weapons to add to your arsenal, you can finally harness the full power of digital through one final research technique: comprehensive data analytics. Keep on reading to learn more about the importance of in-depth analysis after your data collection today.

Harnessing market research methods: Data analysis

Data collection and analysis are two sides of the same research coin. With a well-planned and thoughtfully executed analytics process, you can discover meaningful patterns, trends, and insights that may lead to your understanding of valuable consumer behaviors.

By navigating necessary statistical methods such as analyzing and auditing content, you gain the ability to gauge consumer emotions better, extract actionable insights, and make informed marketing decisions overall.

Proficiency in data analysis will help you understand customers better - a skill that is crucial in effective digital marketing research. By harnessing the power of this analytical technique, you’ll be able to come up with emotionally resonant strategies that lead to successful executions for your brand in the long run.

Transforming insights into actionable strategies

With the combined powers of your marketing tools, data analysis, and insight generation, you can craft a strong foundation for your strategies that can lead to actionable and successful executions.

By constantly measuring your executions, you’ll also be able to evaluate, refine, and improve future strategies, thus allowing you to continue this brilliant cycle of digital marketing wins.

So always remember to record, evaluate, and refine your work, so that you can understand your results and transform insights into actionable strategies in the future. By putting this marketing research practice in place, you’ll always be able to create digital marketing campaigns that resonate with audiences and drive brand wins today.

Key takeaways

Equip yourself with the tools and techniques needed to drive marketing wins for your business. Take these final tips with you as you embark on your exciting journey towards digital marketing success this year:

  • Always collect and analyze data. By utilizing a data-driven approach to your promotions, you’ll be always able to track, refine, and improve your executions for better results for your brand in the long run.
  • Update your arsenal constantly. With more and more transformations happening in the online space every day, remember to keep an eye out for new tools and updates that you can use to constantly update your marketing arsenal too.
  • Take a team with you. Use this as an opportunity to team up with the professionals at Propelrr for expert advice on your brand’s success today.

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