Knowing your audience is essential to ensuring your message is heard, but many small businesses and entrepreneurs don’t have a ton of money to invest in premium tracking tools and services. A shortage of funds isn’t as big of an issue as you may think. There are a several free tools to identify your audience, their interests and what they search online.

What are the Best FREE Tools to Identify Your Audience?

Google Analytics

The best, and most widely used, tool for this is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics you will receive monitoring reports on who is visiting your site. When you are ready to take it a step further, the Audience tab will help you zero in on their site behavior, demographic, interests, search activity and more; painting a clear picture of your audience.

Think with Google

Here you will find multiple integrated free tools to identify your audience, their path to making a purchase and shopping trends. Think with Google includes Shopping Insights, Google Trends, Test My Site, Consumer Barometer, Display Benchmarks and Market Finder. Let’s focus on Shopping Insights and Google Trends for now.

Shopping Insights “helps you gauge trends by city, region, and season with search volume data for more than 6,000 products and services.” To get started you will need to identify your industry, business size and region. It will then help to uncover the various marketing channels that your customers are most likely to use (in order of preference) on their path to making a purchase. This allows you to make data-driven decisions, instead of shots in the dark.

Google Trends is “an invaluable tool for marketers who need information about the products, events, and services that matter most to their audiences.” To get started with using this free tool to identify your audience trends and unforeseen behaviors, you will need to enter some key terms. The terms you use should be specific to your industry, product and known audience. Over time, the data you receive will help to prepare for market fluctuations and explain those that were unforeseen.  Basically, when you are ready to dig in beyond the how, when and where your audience is searching, this tool will provide real-time data to help you gain insight to consumer behavior over time.

These are a few of the best, but there are tons of free tools to help you identify and reach your audience. Please leave a comment with any questions you may have.