Conducting market research is the first step in developing a new product idea, identifying market opportunities, or keeping up with competitors.
The quality of your decisions comes from the quality of your information. To make any important decision, you should understand the market landscape and know your target customers and competitors. This is where market research tools make your job easier.
Here are the best market research tools for B2B companies.
There are two main ways to do market research: primary and secondary. Primary research involves getting answers directly from your target customers. The best primary research is hi-fi: straight from the source, unbiased and including a lot of qualitative information. Secondary research involves accessing and analyzing existing data on your industry, competitors, and trends.
Here are the top B2B tools for both use cases:
These tools help you get direct insights from your target audience.
Who it’s for: Wynter is used by marketing leaders and C-level executives in charge of strategy.
Wynter is an on-demand B2B market research tool that provides feedback from your requested audience in under 48 hours. You can ask any questions and get direct answers from your target customers.
Built specifically for B2B companies, Wynter is a self-serve platform with access to a network of over 60,000 manually verified B2B professionals. This large pool ensures you can find your exact target customers for any B2B product.
Survey your target group about their needs, behaviors, and pain points, or get feedback on your messaging.
Learn how to master messaging and the importance of message testing.
Wynter overview
What users like about Wynter
Pricing
Wynter offers annual plans and pay-as-you-go options. Subscriptions start at $6,990 / year. The fee includes participant responses.
What is Wynter best for?
Getting fast results directly from your B2B target customers.
Who it’s for: As an advanced research tool, Qualtrics XM is ideal for research and insights leaders and teams.
Qualtrics XM offers multiple tools for collecting and analyzing data about your products, customers, brand, and employees. Their advanced software supports both quantitative and qualitative research.
The XM Strategy and Research tool helps you create, distribute, and analyze surveys and detailed research projects. You can access over 30 pre-built projects to start your research quickly, or create custom projects using advanced logic and question types.
You can also use XM Strategy and Research to discover market trends, identify customer needs, and track changing behaviors. Their Audience Management tool helps you automatically recruit, reward, and manage your research panel.
XM for Strategy and Research overview
What users like about Qualtrics for Strategy and Research
Pricing
Qualtrics pricing depends on the specific features and seat counts. Respondents cost extra.
What is Qualtrics XM for Strategy and Research best for?
Collecting and analyzing data for complex research projects.
Who it’s for: Chances are you’re familiar with SurveyMonkey, one of the most popular survey tools worldwide. You can create various forms and surveys with SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey also offers a specialized Market Research tool with additional features. For example, you can distribute your survey to your own audience or select from a global panel that matches your filters. SurveyMonkey’s audience includes over 175 million people, allowing you to target based on a variety of criteria.
After you survey your target audience, SurveyMonkey automatically cleans your data to remove poor-quality answers. You can then create custom reports and export them to share with others.
SurveyMonkey Market Research overview
What users like about SurveyMonkey
Pricing
SurveyMonkey has three pricing tiers for teams:
For the Market Research solution, you can create a free account and get consumer feedback starting at $1 per response.
What is SurveyMonkey best for?
Customizable survey creation.
Who it’s for: NewtonX is perfect for insights and research leaders, and executives working in B2B.
Designed for B2B market research, NewtonX gives you access to expert insights from a network of 1.1 billion professionals. The tool helps you perform research using different methodologies and includes quantitative, qualitative and combined research.
The platform takes your business question and transforms it into a query composed of over 40 search fields. NewtonX’s AI-driven algorithm customizes searches to find the subject matter expertise based to your needs and identifies the exact audience for your business questions. NewtonX guarantees 100% verified research, claiming that every search is custom with no data recycling.
NewtonX overview
What users like about NewtonX
Pricing
Their minimum project fee is ~$5k. The cost per participant for a 10-minute survey is $165.
What is NewtonX is best for?
Reaching niche B2B audiences.
Use the following tools to uncover current trends, benchmark yourself against competitors and better understand the market landscape.
Who it’s for: Emporia’s programmatic sampling for B2B audiences is suitable for a diverse set of clients, including market research agencies, creative and advertising agencies, management consultancies and corporations.
Emporia is a B2B market research tool that lets you collect data from verified third-party sources. With its AI-powered search, Emporia scans academic journals and clinical trial data, and sources candidates via LinkedIn, email and more. Their database has 800M of professional profiles they can access. Emporia has a layered approach to make sure their participants are who they say they are: a primary point of contact through a corporate domain followed by a check against LinkedIn.
You can tailor your audience based on their management level, job title, company, headcount and industry to reach the professionals you need. Delivery time with common audiences is around two to five days.
Emporia Research overview
What users like about Emporia Research
Most online reviews of Emporia Research are by participants/respondents
Pricing
Emporia’s costs vary depending on the seniority and incidence of the professionals in question. As an example, a quantitative research project like a 15-minute survey can range from $60 to $90 and a qualitative project like a 1-hour interview can range from $300 to $700.
What is Emporia Research best for?
Collecting third-party data for B2B research.
Who it’s for: Similarweb is a good fit for digital marketing teams, business development professionals, and anyone else looking for website traffic data and competitive benchmarks.
The platform provides insights into website traffic, online performance and benchmarks to help you identify market trends and competitors. You can use Similarweb to find out more about your competitors’ traffic and marketing.
Similarweb has data from 100 million websites across 190 countries and 210 categories. The data is split into categories, including website overview (visits, ranking and more), audience, geography, search traffic, display advertising, similar sites, referring sites, social, and mobile apps.
Although you’re not getting direct feedback from your target customers, you can still validate the market size, monitor competitors, track customer behavior and access industry benchmarks to see how you measure up across industries and geographies.
Similarweb overview
What users like about Similarweb
Pricing: Similarweb has multiple pricing options.
Starter: starting from $125/mo
Professional: $333/mo
Team: request a quote
Enterprise: request a quote
What is Similarweb best for?
Macro analysis of the online market, competitors and trends.
Who it’s for: Semrush is mostly used by digital marketers and SEO professionals.
Semrush is one of the leading SEO tools and its market research software will give you data on the market size and growth potential, key players, their online market share and traffic generation strategies helping you benchmark yourself against your competitors.
Although you can use Semrush for keyword research and website analytics, some of Semrush’s tools are particularly useful for market research. The Market Explorer helps you map out a specific market or niche, including a list of top competitors, their online market shares and growth rates as well as audience interests and demographics. EyeOn monitors your competition and Traffic Analytics lets you explore demand, interests and geo-distribution of your target customers.
Semrush overview
What users like about Semrush
Pricing
Semrush offers three pricing tiers
Pro: $129.95/month
Guru: $249.95/month
Business: reach out to sales to get a quote
What is Semrush best for?
Keyword research and website analytics.
Who it’s for: Statista can be used by researchers, analysts and academics as well as various teams in B2B companies, including marketing and business development.
Statista gives you easy access to market reports, consumer surveys, industry studies, and trend reports. You can explore a vast library of statistics like market size, revenue metrics and growth forecasts for specific industries, which can help you analyze markets and identify trends.
Not only can you access a lot of data across 170 industries and 150+ countries but you can also view it in different ways making it easier to visualize and grasp.
Statista overview
What users like about Statista
Pricing
Statista has three pricing tiers.
Personal account: $549/month
Professional account: $959 /month
Business suite: get in touch to get a quote
What is Statista is best for?
Getting stats on various topics across industries and geographies.
Who it’s for: Corporate strategists and innovators, people leading strategy, innovation, R&D, research, and insights -- typically at F5000 companies.
Wonder is an on-demand research platform for corporate innovation teams. They offer AI-powered insights and human-powered reports on trends, competitors and market trends. You can use Wonder to explore and analyze a topic, create a data set or validate an idea.
Wonder’s conversational AI Claire will help you define your topic and goal before providing findings and data points reviewed by human analysts. All insights come from secondary sources like scientific journals, industry reports and company annual reports, and they’re cited in your report.
There are many ways to use Wonder so here are a few examples from real users:
Wonder overview
What users like about Wonder
There are not a lot of reviews of AskWonder online.
Pricing
It’s about $120,000 per year.
AskWonder is best for…
Getting insights on niche topics.
B2B companies do market research to:
As a result, you can make better business decisions.
Take a look at our B2B Buyer Journey Research 2024.
Always ask companies which vendors they are using for B2B market research or qualitative/demand research surveys, and what’s the cost per response.
What you will often learn is that they're using an old school vendor that provides you like 400 people for $1800 or 500 for $2000 - for an audience of supposed B2B SaaS marketing leaders or HR bosses or CISOs or whatnot.
That's like $4-$5 per respondent.... which means the vendor must be paying $2-$3 per response (or less)... --> this is fraud. These are no professionals and executives, but regular consumers pretending to be one.
No director or VP will fill out a survey for a dollar. Lots of students, unemployed people and folks in developing countries - absolutely.
Consumer research is super cheap, paying $0.50-$2 per response. (Most consumer research tools out there are using the same mturk panel)
So if you get B2B audiences for similar prices... those are no B2B audiences. If you make decisions based on that data... let's just say that the quality of your decisions comes from the quality of your information.
Another scammy thing that is widespread: those same vendors selling you "B2B" respondents for $4-5 actively discourage you to ask open-ended questions.
"Do multiple choice!", they recommend.
Why? While they claim its survey fatigue (a true phenomenon), really they know they're selling fraud. And if you only do multiple choice questions, you will never find out.
Story time:
We had an early customer, the business was AI for organic traffic, and used third-party panels to source B2B SaaS CMOs for them. Oh how the well-known vendor fought us on open-ended questions, but they allowed 2 in the end.
Those supposed CMOs looked at the AI for organic traffic company’s website asked: what does organic food have to do with traffic on the streets? They even didn't get the concept of organic traffic. Let's just say that those were no CMOs.
Every B2B research industry veteran knows this.
Now that you’ve got a list of popular B2B market research tools, how do you decide which tool is right for you? Here are a few tips.
It’s not an easy decision so take your time to analyze the tools before making a purchase.
Wynter is the right fit for you when you're wondering what your target customer (ICP) pain points are, how to best market to them, and how to get to messaging that really resonates with them.