Market research is crucial for any kind of business. It helps you identify your ideal customer, uncover their needs, help you plan marketing campaigns, and keep your company competitive.
In today’s fast-changing business world, using effective market research is more important than ever.
Traditional research methods like surveys, focus groups and interviews provide valuable insights directly from the people. However, they are often costly and time-consuming.
Integrating AI technology can make a significant difference. AI can help automate data collection and analysis, saving you time, money, and effort.
Let’s take a look at how you can incorporate AI tools into your market research process.
What is an AI Market Research Tool?
AI market research tools act like smart personal assistants. They can help you collect, process, and interpret large volumes of information.
If you use them strategically, AI market research tools enhance market research in several key ways:
Enhance your Productivity
One of the most tedious parts of market research is transcribing interviews for analysis. AI tools can be enormously helpful here. They can transcribe and analyse faster than any team of people.
AI marketing research tools can rapidly process qualitative insights from focus group audios, survey responses, social media posts, reviews, and more. You can identify trends, patterns, and sentiment shifts far quicker than human analysis.
AI tool’s enhanced search and summarization capabilities are also invaluable for secondary research.
Get In-Depth Insights
AI marketing research tools can break down complex data to uncover hidden details about customer behaviour and preferences. You can use this data to customise your products, services, and marketing strategies.
Collect Dynamic Data
Using past studies and questionnaires, AI market research tools can automatically design new surveys for you. You can automatically customise survey questions, answer choices, explanatory text, and languages for each project.
Budget Friendly
AI market research tools are cheaper than hiring market research firms. They allow small businesses to access powerful insights without draining their resources.
AI holds significant promise for market research. Take the time to understand its capabilities and be an early adopter. The long-term benefits of integrating AI are substantial.
At cosmetics manufacturer L’Oréal, researchers use AI to analyse millions of online conversations, images, and videos from over 3,500 sources. Their goal is to identify emerging trends before competitors do. So far, the system has identified 700 to 800 trends worth investigating by internal teams.
7 Best AI Market Research Tools
AI market research tools excel at quickly analysing data and identifying crucial trends and patterns. They can also automate various aspects of data collection.
You can also use these tools to get suggestions on how to apply your findings and take your business to the next level.
After considerable experiments, here are 7 of the top AI market research tools we recommend:
1. Speak AI
Running focus groups or interviews can be tedious. Especially transcribing and analysing the interactions. Speak simplifies this process by automatically transcribing your interviews. You can upload audio or video. Speak will transcribe and analyse the contents using AI.
Speak can also analyze surveys and form data. You can also use it to scrape entire websites for summarization and analysis.
Imagine you run an ecommerce business. You have just surveyed 250 customers about your new return policy. Reading all 250 responses would be time-consuming. Speak can analyse the answers and provide a clear picture of customer opinions in minutes.
It can reveal what people truly think and feel. You can tell whether the responses are happy, sad, excited, or indifferent. This gives your business a unique advantage by offering deeper insights into customer sentiment and behaviour.
You can even ask Speak’s chatbot questions about your data and receive responses in a conversational format.
I’ve used it to transcribe and analyse some interviews. I haven’t found anything to dislike. The pricing can be confusing. But their customer service is helpful.
You can use Speak AI’s basic transcription service on a pay-as-you-go basis. For full access, you’ll need to subscribe to a $17/month plan.
Another option to consider is Gong. It transcribes your calls and provides AI-generated summaries.
2. ChatGPT
You’re probably already familiar with ChatGPT. It is a conversational AI chatbot. You can use it for secondary research and data analysis.
When you conduct surveys or interviews, you can feed your data to ChatGPT. You can then ask it questions about your data. It can also create summaries and customer personas based on your data.
I’ve fed CSV files with nearly a thousand lines of data to ChatGPT. Within seconds, it started answering questions using the data file. I was able to get detailed customer insights in minutes without having to sift through each data point myself.
ChatGPT’s conversational approach makes understanding complex insights feel natural.
ChatGPT can also help generate survey questions. In my experience, the quality of these questions varies widely. Use it to brainstorm ideas. Then refine the questions based on best practices. You can learn how to create effective survey questions from our market research guide.
ChatGPT also makes secondary research easier. For example, I asked it: “Imagine you are an investment analyst evaluating the VR industry. What is the current market size, and what are the growth projections for the next five years? Discuss the factors influencing these forecasts.”
The response was quite insightful.
Other ChatGPT prompt you can try:
- Pretend you’re a data analyst. Help me estimate the market size for [specific product/service] in [region/country].
- Act like a market research consultant. Provide me with a detailed analysis of my top five competitors in the [specific industry].
- Act as a McKenzie consultant. write a market research report in the style of a strategic analyst on the state of the [specific industry].
- Pretend you are a seasoned marketing analyst in the [industry] industry, analyse the current trends, and predict future shifts. How have these trends impacted consumer behaviour and market dynamics?
- Who are the major players in the [industry] industry, and what are their key strengths and weaknesses?
- Imagine you are an investment analyst evaluating the [industry] industry. What is the current market size, and what are the growth projections for the next five years?
ChatGPT is free to use. But if you want the latest version with the most advanced capabilities, you’ll need to pay $20/month.
For secondary research, I also suggest Perplexity AI. I’ve found that it sometimes provides more precise, context-aware responses.
3. SEMRush Market Explorer
SEMrush Market Explorer is a fantastic tool for digital market research. It provides insights into industries, key players, market shares, and audiences. It makes it very easy to do in-depth online market analysis.
Key features of SemRush Market Explorer include:
- Market Overview: You can identify key players, understand market size and growth, and analyse website traffic trends.
- Competitive Analysis: You can compare your website to competitors and assess your strengths and weaknesses.
- Audience Insights: You can uncover the demographics, interests, and online behaviour of your target audience.
- Discover Opportunities: You can identify potential customers and untapped market segments.
Thanks to its extensive database, SEMRush offers rapid and detailed analysis. It can keep you informed about industry developments. You’ll also get invaluable insights into niche demographics and markets.
One drawback of SEMRush is the cost. The cheapest plan starts at $129/month.
4. Survey Sparrow
Survey Sparrow helps you create and administer online market research surveys. It supports every step of your market research process. You can create surveys with AI, share them, analyse the data, and generate insights.
Setting up Survey Sparrow is straightforward. I didn’t like that I had to give my email and phone number to see the pricing. But the rest of the setup process was smooth.
The intuitive UI makes creating surveys easy. The generated reports are also clear and easy to understand.
One thing I really liked about Survey Sparrow is its smart survey system. Unlike traditional paper surveys, you can tailor questions to different types of respondents. You can also adjust questions based on previous answers for a more personalised interaction.
Even the basic pricing tier allowed me to use logic and variables in the survey.
If you don’t have an existing customer base, Survey Sparrow has an extensive and diverse audience panel. You can survey them to get feedback on new products or business ideas.
Survey Sparrow is a little bit expensive. The starter plan is priced at $59/month and allows for 1,250 survey responses. Some of the more advanced features are only available in higher-priced plans.
5. Pecan
Pecan is a predictive analytics platform. It can help you uncover future trends in your sectors. You can feed it your data and get detailed predictions without any machine learning experience.
You can use it to predict customer retention, calculate lifetime value, forecast revenue, and more. You don’t have to worry about complex data analysis or data cleaning. Just upload your messy CSV file. Pecan’s AI takes care of everything.
The user interface is intuitive and visually appealing. You can even chat with their chatbot to explore your data and prediction.
One downside of Pecan is that it can be a bit slow. You won’t get fast analysis like you get with ChatGPT.
Pricing for Pecan starts at $17 per month. They also offer flexible pricing. You can only pay for what you use.
6. Crayon
Crayon uses AI to track your competitors across the internet. It monitors their website updates, job postings, social media activities, etc and sends you a daily email with any changes.
Getting real-time updates on all your competitors can be a huge advantage. You don’t have to manually check their websites, social media, or industry reports anymore. An in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape can help you stay ahead.
Crayon allows you to set customizable alerts to track specific changes or trends. You’ll get only the essential updates. Crayon’s AI can also summarise any news. You won’t drown in unnecessary information.
You can also generate custom reports focusing on specific competitors, industries, or topics. You can tailor the report to meet your specific needs.
Crayon’s pricing isn’t transparent. You need to fill out a form to hear an estimate from them.
7. Poll the People
If you need to conduct a survey but lack an audience, Poll the People is a great alternative to Survey Sparrow. It uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help you create, distribute, and analyse market research surveys.
Poll the People allows you to access over half a million people. You can survey them to get feedback on concepts, test ad efficiency, and preview audience reception of branded content.
Their interface is intuitive and user-friendly. I was able to build a complete survey in less than five minutes. The surveying process also works quite fast. You can target specific demographics and get responses immediately.
You can analyse the survey results with the help of integrated AI.
Poll the People offers a pay-as-you-go plan. You can sign up for free and pay just $1 per response. For multiple large surveys, you can use the Plus plan. For $50/month, you can run up to 10 surveys with 500 responses each month.
Using AI for Market Research Will Make Your Life Easier
According to Research from Deloitte, 94% of business leaders believe AI is critical for success in the coming years. Without AI, you risk missing out on significant opportunities for success and rapid growth.
AI can analyse mountains of information, pinpoint key trends, and unearth insights you might miss. This frees you up to focus on the big picture: strategic decisions that leverage your creativity.
But remember, AI is a powerful assistant, not your replacement. AI’s findings can be logical, but may lack the subtle understanding that comes with human experience. Don’t blindly accept research findings if they don’t seem right.
