14 Best Market Research Tools in 2021 (w/ Free Options)

Are you looking for the best market research tools?

Market research tools can help simplify your research process and make it easy to collect, analyze, and put customer and market data to use.

In this article, we’ll share the best market research tools for your business, so you can make data driven decisions.

Why Do You Need to Use Market Research Tools?

Market research is the process of understanding your customer’s behavior, preferences, and industry as a whole.

Market research tools simplify this process and make it easy to understand your target market, refine your marketing strategy, and gather helpful customer feedback.

By doing market research, you give your business a better chance at success. When you deeply understand your customers and market, you can create better content, products, and better serve your customers.

Using a market research tool can help streamline your workflow and help give you additional insights:

• Uncover gaps in the market and launch new products and services
• Understand market trends, so you can be the first business in new niches
• Create more compelling content and website copy to turn visitors into customers
• Study your competition to see what they’re doing well, and where you can improve
• Use data to better serve your customers, so they stay with you over the long-term

With that said, let’s take a look at some of the best market research tools you can use along with your WordPress website.

1. WPForms

WPForms is the best WordPress survey form plugin and contact form plugin in the market used by over 4 million websites.

It’s very beginner friendly and lets you build out online surveys, polls, questionnaires, and user feedback forms simply with the drag and drop builder.

You can also use one of the 100+ pre-built templates to quickly create the exact form you need.

The powerful survey and polls addon lets you easily create engaging survey forms to collect customer and market data.

You can combine this addon with other useful features like conditional logic, multi-page forms, and even conversational forms to make your forms feel more human.

You can add all kinds of survey form fields, like checkboxes, radio buttons, net promoter score (NPS) field, ratings, and more.

Best of all, WPForms automatically creates beautiful reports with graphs and charts to help you better understand your data. You can also export these graphs as images to share on social media or embed them into your website.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a survey in WordPress with beautiful reports.

The free version of WPForms lets you simply create contact forms in WordPress, but if you want to create advanced surveys and more, then you’ll need a premium plan that currently starts at $199 per year.

2. Think with Google Research

Think with Google Research is a collection of tools that will help you understand your market, uncover new trends, and gain valuable insights to give you an advantage.

This group of tools offers high-level insights into your market, useful statistics, and other marketing tools to put your insights to work.

For example, there’s a Market Insights tool that can help you find new regional and global markets.

You’ll also find a Rising Retail Categories tool that will show you trending eCommerce categories, like Google Trends for eCommerce.

You can filter this data by different countries and view it on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

For those who edit videos, or have a YouTube channel, you can use the Find My Audience Tool to uncover new audiences on YouTube and learn how you can easily reach them.

3. Semrush

Semrush is the best keyword research tool and content marketing research tool in the market. It’s used by everyone from SEO professionals to beginner bloggers.

Note: we use Semrush here at WPBeginner for a lot of SEO and content tasks like tracking keyword rankings and keyword research.

You can use the keyword research features to see how many people search for a given keyword and if it’s growing in popularity or becoming less popular.

If you’re using Google Analytics, then you can also use that to get additional insights about your website visitors.

It also provides in-depth data on other relevant and popular search terms, your competitor’s search engine ranking positions, and a lot more.

To get a big picture view of your market and competitors, you can use the competitive research toolkit to see your competitor’s traffic, authority sites, up and coming websites, and more.

If you want access to detailed content and keyword research data, then the pricing for premium plans starts at $119.95 per month and gives you full access to keyword, SEO, and traffic data.

Deal: our readers can get an extended 30-day free trial by using our Semrush coupon code.

4. Statista

Statista is a data research platform that provides easy to digest data across multiple industries and niches.

The reports, graphs, and data are continually updated with the most recent information, so you’ll never be viewing data that’s out of date.

The data this tool provides is very specific. No matter how niche your industry you’ll be able to access valuable data you can use to create buyer personas, unique content, and more.

Plus, the same chart is updated as new data becomes available. So, you can continue to view the same graph and see how market data changes as time goes on.

This tool provides a ton of free data, while the more niche reports and data are only available on premium plas that start at $39 per month when billed yearly.

5. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is a great content research and market insight tool used by brands like Hubspot, Buzzfeed, and more. It lets marketers take a deep dive into what content is the most popular in certain niches.

When you’re creating a new article for your WordPress blog you want it to be successful. A great way to do this is to see what content your audience already loves and create something similar.

Buzzsumo lets you dig deep into the top performing articles across the web, so you can see what gets the most social shares and the types of content that are the most popular.

You also get access to data from the past 5 years, so you can see which topics are trending.

It can also help you find influencers in your space and uncover keyword opportunities you might have missed.

Buzzsumo has a free forever plan that gives you 10 free searches per month. If you want access to unlimited searches and more tools, then pro plans start at $99 per month.

6. US Census Bureau

The US Census Bureau has a free resource that lets you search all US census data.

This can provide you with a lot of useful demographic information. You can filter your searches by income, age, year, and location.

There are also built-in data visualization tools so that you can see the size of potential markets across the US.

If you’re looking to expand your business into different areas across the US, then you can see where your industry is already oversaturated and where there are still gaps in the market.

7. NielsenIQ

NielsenIQ offers retail and consumer insights to help grow your business. If you’re considering launching a new product line, then the data and insights here will help you launch more effectively.

You get access to product forecast metrics which will help to predict how well your products will sell when you launch. It will also help you determine the right channels to distribute your products.

If you don’t have a lot of customer data to work with, then you can run a market research survey to NeilsenIQ’s list of partners.

However, NielsenIQ is a more expensive solution, so businesses with a smaller budget will want to try different business intelligence solutions on this list first.

8. Gartner

Gartner provides incredibly accurate and detailed industry reports that experts create. One of the most popular offerings is Magic Quadrant, which helps you identify industry trends, gaps in the market, and much more.

There are various other reports too, like the Critical Capabilities report that compares competing products and services against each other.

The goal of the reports is to help make your business decision making much easier.

You’ll also find data analysis and visualization tools to give you a big-picture understanding of your market. Plus, in-depth research reports to help you stay ahead of your competition.

9. Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a free data visualization tool. This tool can help you make sense of the complex data you’ve gathered and better understand your market.

You can import data from a ton of different sources including, excel spreadsheets, PDFs, text, and more. The tool will then analyze the data and present the data in an interactive dashboard.

Here you can customize the data with colorful tables and charts.

Since it’s a free public platform, you can share this data with your team across mobile, desktop, and even email.

10. Upwave

Upwave (formerly Survata) is a market research and analytics platform to help measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

It lets you easily visualize your marketing data in real-time, so you can see what areas of your marketing are the most successful.

Upwave includes predictive analysis to help forecast the success of your campaigns and let you make changes on the fly.

Beyond gathering data for your current campaigns, they offer a platform called Instant Insights by PureSpectrum. This lets you launch your own customer study to gather valuable respondent data.

Your unique data is updated in real-time and presented in an easy to understand graph format.

11. Pew Research Center

The Pew Research Center is a nonprofit that provides in-depth and accurate data across a wide range of industries.

The research and in-depth reports cover industries like social trends, science, technology and the internet, global interests, social media, online privacy, and much more.

Each report also includes graphs and a demographic breakdown of each industry, like this one on social media use for US adults.

Included with each report is a detailed breakdown of how they conduct their studies, which can help you understand how the data can apply to your business.

All of this information will help you find new opportunities to expand and better understand your market.

12. LivingFacts

LivingFacts is created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the same company behind The Pew Research Center.

The focus of this data is on Americans and how they live. If you have a website with a US audience, then this website will help you understand current demographic trends.

For example, you’ll find research covering US demographics, faith and religion, overall health, money and work, and upcoming trends.

Best of all, the data is presented in an easy to read format filled with statistics, infographics, and fun facts.

13. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder and best WordPress calculator plugin in the market. It helps you build complex form solutions quickly.

One great feature is the ability to create custom calculators. When most people think of a calculator, they think of math class or an app on their phone.

However, Formidable Forms lets you create unique calculators that can provide you with all kinds of unique data about your audience.

For example, you can create mortgage calculators, request a quote calculators, car payment calculators, and much more.

These calculators are not only a great way to get backlinks and get more traffic but can be a very useful source of data you can use to improve your website and business.

You can also format, filter, and display your user-submitted data on the front end of your website.

To get access to the powerful calculator features, you need to purchase the Business plan that’s currently $199.50 per month.

14. Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is a tool that gives you access to data about your Facebook page and Facebook as a whole.

As the largest social media network in the world with nearly 2.5 million monthly active users, this data can be very useful to your brand.

It gives you information like age, gender, job title, hobbies, location, relationship status, and more.

This data will help you deeply understand your target audience and find new ways to expand your audience across Facebook.

Which is the Best Market Research Tool? (Expert Pick)

After using the most popular market research tools we believe that WPForms, Think with Google, and Semrush are the best tools in the market.

WPForms lets you easily collect customer data that you can use to create better content, improve your website and business, and more.

Think with Google is a great market research platform that helps online store owners and new startups gather useful market data.

Semrush can help you understand what brings your competitors traffic, and what your customer’s are searching for online easily.

If you’re looking for detailed statistics you can use throughout your content, or just gain insight into your market as a whole, then Statista is also a great option.

We also tried other market research platforms like Qualtrics, TypeForm, SurveyMonkey, Make My Persona, and Social Mention, but we decided to keep the list short to make your decision easier.

We hoped this article helped you find the best market research tool for your business. You may also want to see our list of the best email marketing services and our expert picks of the best business phone services for small business.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 14 Best Market Research Tools in 2021 (w/ Free Options) appeared first on WPBeginner.

July 02, 2021 at 05:05PM

How to Customize WooCommerce Checkout Page (The Easy Way)

Do you want to customize your WooCommerce checkout page?

The default WooCommerce checkout page isn’t optimized for conversions. By customizing and optimizing your checkout page, you can increase your conversions and make more sales.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily customize your WooCommerce checkout page, step by step without writing any code.

Why Customize WooCommerce Checkout Page in WordPress?

Studies show that between 70 – 85% of all carts are abandoned. In other words, majority of users are leaving your checkout pages without making a purchase.

Creating a custom WooCommerce checkout page gives you a final opportunity to turn a website visitor into a customer before they leave your store.

With a custom checkout page, you can add testimonials / social proof elements to build trust, add related products to boost revenue, and optimize the overall page layout for better conversions.

All of these will elevate conversions and make it more likely your visitor will become a long-term customer.

Before you move forward, you may also want to customize your WooCommerce cart page to improve conversions here too.

If you’re using WooCommerce’s cart and checkout pages together, then you’ll want these pages to have similar branding to offer your visitors a great checkout experience.

By customizing these together, you can improve your overall conversions and earn more revenue. For more details, see our guide on how to create a custom WooCommerce cart page without writing any code.

With that said, let’s take a look at how you can easily customize your WooCommerce checkout page and make more money from your online store.

How to Customize Your WooCommerce Checkout Page in WordPress

SeedProd is the best drag and drop WordPress page builder used by over 1 million websites. It lets you easily customize your WooCommerce checkout page to make more sales.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: there is a free version of SeedProd that’s available, but for this tutorial, we’ll show the Pro version since it has built-in WooCommerce blocks.

Once the plugin is activated, go to SeedProd » Settings and enter your license key.

You can find this information under your account page on the SeedProd website.

After that, navigate to Seedprod » Pages and then click on the ‘Add New Landing Page’ button.

Next, you’ll be asked to choose a landing page template. There are dozens of professionally designed templates for you to choose from.

You’ll notice that the templates are filtered by different categories. Choosing a template category that matches the type of page you want to create can help you build your page faster.

With that said, every template can be fully customized, no matter which template you choose.

For this tutorial, we’ll select the ‘Blank’ template since this lets us build the exact kind of checkout page we want.

To select a template, hover over it and click the ‘Checkmark’ icon.

After that, you’ll be asked to name your page. The page name will also match the URL for your checkout page.

Then, click the ‘Save and Start Editing Page’ button.

This will take you to the drag and drop editor, where you can build your custom WooCommerce checkout page.

The right side will be your page preview, and the left side is the options panel to help you customize.

First, we’ll add a header so that you can maintain your branding.

To do this, click on the ’Sections’ menu option in the left hand panel and then click the ‘Header’ category.

After that, hover over the ‘Header 1’ template and click the ‘Plus’ icon.

Next, click the ‘Image’ section of your page and upload your store logo on the left hand menu.

Then, you can delete the navigation menu by hovering over it and clicking ‘Delete Block’.

Deleting the other menu items reduces the number of page exits and makes it more likely your visitor will complete their purchase.

Once you’ve done that, click on the button labeled ‘Call to Action’.

We’re going to change the text so it says ‘View Cart’.

This lets your users go back to their cart page to add items or change the quantity.

Then, add the URL of your WooCommerce cart page to the box labeled ‘Link’.

You can make the link nofollow or open in a new tab, but we’ll leave the default settings.

Next, click the content and sidebar layout in the ‘Choose your layout:’ section.

This lets you create a section for your checkout, plus a recommended product section.

After that, locate the ‘Checkout’ block in the WooCommerce section and drag it over to your page.

You can completely customize how your checkout looks, including the color scheme, font choice, link color, buttons, and more.

Next, you can add a popular products or recommended products section. This lets you improve your sales by promoting other products shoppers could be interested in.

To add this, simply drag over the ‘Best Selling Products’ block from the ‘WooCommerce’ section.

You can choose any of the other WooCommerce product blocks as well.

Next, you can add a headline above the popular products.

Simply drag the ‘Headline’ block over to your page above the popular products. You can customize the font, size, text, color, and more.

Once you’ve done that, you can add a testimonials block. This acts as social proof and assures your visitors they’re making the right decision.

Find the ‘Testimonials’ block and drag it underneath your popular products.

The testimonials block can be completely customized.

You can add a customer photo, job title, and more.

Another thing you can do to improve social proof even more is add a star rating right under your testimonial.

Simply select the ‘Star Rating’ block and drag it under your testimonial.

After you’re done customizing your WooCommerce checkout page, you can make it live by clicking the drop down arrow next to the ‘Save’ button and select ‘Publish’.

Now, instead of the default WooCommerce checkout, you’ve created a high converting WooCommerce checkout page.

Feel free to continue customizing your page and testing out different elements, sections, and blocks.

Pro tip: you can track your WooCommerce checkout page performance to see if your customizations are improving revenue. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to setup WooCommerce conversion tracking.

Assign Your Checkout Page to WooCommerce

Once you’ve finished customizing your checkout page and made it live, you need to change the default WooCommerce URL settings.

Changing the URL makes it so your customers will automatically go to your new WooCommerce checkout page, instead of the default option.

First, go to WooCommerce » Settings and click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Then, select the new WooCommerce checkout page URL from the drop down menu.

Make sure to click ’Save changes’ at the bottom of the screen.

Now, when a visitor clicks ‘Proceed to checkout,’ they’ll be taken to your new, high converting page you just built.

Some WooCommerce themes even give customers the option of going straight to the checkout page.

How to Reduce Checkout Page Abandonment

Checkout page abandonment is when a customer starts the checkout process, but doesn’t complete their payment. It’s similar to cart abandonment, but it’s one more step towards completing payment and becoming a customer.

Customizing your checkout page with the tutorial above will go a long way towards optimizing your checkout page for conversions.

However, there are a few things you can do to reduce checkout abandonment further.

Reduce Any Addon Checkout Charges

When customers get to their cart, they expect the total price to be similar to the total product prices.

If they get to checkout and see taxes, high shipping costs, and other additional fees, then there’s a good chance they won’t complete the purchase.

A customer might continue with the purchase if they think the costs are justified. However, the best thing to do is be upfront with your pricing.

If you have a lot of additional fees for fulfilling your products, then add these to your total product prices. Or, explain the reason for the additional costs.

Amazon was able to dominate the eCommerce space by offering free 2-day shipping.

Consider offering free shipping on your products or offering free shipping to orders above a certain amount.

Make Account Creation Optional or Simpler

Requiring account registration before completing a purchase can lead to abandonment. This can increase your email subscribers, but it adds more friction to the buying process.

You can allow your users to create an account, but you don’t have to make it a requirement.

Instead, you can set up a registration form to grow your email list after the user completes their purchase.

You can also simplify the required fields on the checkout page. If you need to collect more information, then you can do that after checkout.

The goal should be to eliminate as many fields (friction points) from user’s way, so they can complete the purchase.

Offer More Checkout Payment Options

Another reason your visitors won’t follow through with the checkout process is that you don’t offer enough payment options.

Your online store should provide the most common payment options.

Your customers will use the payment method that’s most convenient for them.

For more details, see our list of the best WooCommerce payment gateways for WordPress.

We hope this article helped you customize the WooCommerce checkout page easily. You may also want to see our expert picks of the best WooCommerce hosting, and our list of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Customize WooCommerce Checkout Page (The Easy Way) appeared first on WPBeginner.

July 01, 2021 at 04:00PM