11 Customer profiling tools to understand your market

What’s the best way to get to know your customers? You can monitor them or make blind assumptions (don’t!), but what we recommend is using customer profiling tools. They combine the best of both worlds, if you choose the right one for your research.

Customer profiles are essential for product, sales and marketing teams in any consumer brand. They are your way to fully understand your existing and potential customers, and make sure they choose you over your competitors.

That all sounds great, doesn’t it? To make it even better, we’ve gathered a list with eleven awesome customer profiling tools to help you pick the right one. Let’s get profiling!

The best customer profile software

Customer Profiling Tool	Key features	Benefits	Drawbacks	G2 Rating	Pricing
Attest	On-demand research support from our in-house experts Survey data is triple-checked for quality by AI and human checks Intuitive data dashboard to clearly showcase key customer segments	Send surveys to a global audience of consumers- and get granular with the resulting data Mixed-methodology approach for ultra-high data quality Intuitive platform makes consumer research a natural part of your strategy	No social-listening tool included	4.5 Stars	Learn about Attest pricing
Remesh	AI-powered response analysis Analyze open-ended responses in real-time	Multi-language capabilities Suitable for employee research	May not be suitable for smaller companies May be technical for beginners	4.2 Stars	Available on request
Make My Persona Hubspot	Create a persona in 7 steps Choose an avatar and add demographic information	Visualize your persona for easier interactions	Limited in the type of data you can add to the persona	Not available	Free
Google Surveys 360	Advanced demographic targeting User-list targeting Unique survey incentives	Ease of use Integrations with Analytics, Search Ads 360, Google Ads, etc	Limited survey design options	4.5 Stars	Varies per completed response
Latana	Mobile-optimized surveys Niche targeting options	Large survey audience	Smartphone users may provide different customer data compared to non-smartphone users	Not available	Available on request
SurveyMonkey	Collect survey responses from multiple platforms (such as social media and email) Analyze survey response data in their dashboard	Send surveys to your target demographic Advanced features are available with a premium subscription	Limited customization options	4.4 Stars	Starts at $30 per month per user
Toluna	Live discussion functions Audience of 40+ million Interactive dashboard with in-platform capabilities	All-in-one tool for customer insights	May not be suitable for small businesses	4.2 Stars	Available on request
Think with Google	Insights on consumer journey and consumer trends Data from the world’s largest search engine	Free resource created my great researchers	Secondhand data may not be directly applicable to your brand and customers	Not available	Free
Pollfish	Mobile-first surveys that appear in third-party apps Surveys tailored to each individual respondents A/B testing Organic sampling surveying	Quick to collect responses	Not suitable for longer surveys	4.4 Stars	Starts at $95 per month
11Ants	Leverages data from retailer loyalty programs Consumer scoring module to identify the best target groups for your brand Micro segment builder	First-hand data from real customers Get the most from your customer loyalty program	Only suitable for businesses with loyalty programs	5 Stars	Available on request
Facebook Insights	Connect key information on content and customers Easy to use and filter Handy dashboard with extensive data	Detailed audience information	Reliant on one data point (namely Facebook)	Not available	A Facebook business page will come with free access to these analytics tools

New to customer profiling? Here’s our rundown of the 4 essential types of profiling you should know about.

Benefits of customer profiling tools

Customer profile software can really supercharge your sales, marketing and customer insights strategy efforts. Here are some of the ways customer data and customer profile software can benefit your business.

Have better-informed conversations

One of the biggest benefits of using customer profiling tools is that they can help you have more informed conversations with your target audience. By understanding who your ideal customer is, what their needs are, and what motivates them, you can offer them products and services that are perfect for them.

Gather insights that give context to the numbers

Another benefit of using customer profiling tools is that they can provide better insights into how your business is performing, and why. These tools can help you identify and even explain trends and patterns that you may not have been able to see before, by just looking at sales data for instance. This type of information can be invaluable for developing new products or services, fine-tuning your marketing message, or even informing your sales strategy.

Fine-tuning your sales and marketing campaigns

Your marketing message is only as strong as your understanding of your target customer. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s going to be difficult to craft a message that resonates. But with customer profiling, you can develop a more in-depth understanding of your target market and what they’re looking for. This way, you can tailor your marketing message to better appeal to your target audience.

Brand managers: take a look at the essential questions to ask your customers

Customer profiling software gives structure to your conversations

There are plenty of simple survey tools out there, and you can talk to your customers at any point in the customer journey—but that’s often not the best approach. You’ll end up with scattered data in different formats, customers might be annoyed with the interruptions in their buying journey, and the data can be hard to analyze. Choosing the right customer profiling software can help you prevent all that. The tools we’re about to show you are built specifically for interacting with your customers in a respectful way that adds value to your research.

Scale up your research

One of the great things about customer profiling software is that it can help you scale up your research. The tools that use AI or analyze large amounts of data enable you to look at data from thousands of customers, without needing a lot of resources or a big team.

11 Top customer profiling software

1. Attest

We’re starting strong, with our very own customer profile software. Our consumer profiling platform enables you to send out great surveys which will allow you to connect to your current customers and potential customers and really get to the bottom of what they need from a product or service like yours.

We’ve got research templates ready to be tailored to your specific research needs, or you can start from scratch—with the help of one of our dedicated research experts. You can build your surveys with a variety of question formats, such as multiple choice, Likert scale and open-ended questions.

We’ve also made it easy to filter through specific audiences, so you’re talking to the most relevant people. Surveys are completely anonymous, so you can be sure that your respondents will feel comfortable giving honest feedback.

And once the answers start coming in, you can easily analyze them in our powerful dashboard with dozens of filters to help you make the most of your data.

Pricing: Learn about Attest pricing

Key features: 

• Reach 150+ million people in 59 countries
• On-demand research support from our in-house experts—the Customer Research Team
• Data is triple-checked for quality by AI and human checks
• Intuitive dashboard that showcases your data in a clear way

Pros:

• Access to a designated research expert to support your research needs
• ​​Mixed-methodology approach for ultra-high data quality
• Intuitive platform makes consumer research a natural part of your strategy

Cons:

• No social-listening tool included

2. Remesh

Remesh uses AI to enable you to have a conversation with a lot of your customers at once. While you are having a live conversation, the AI will analyze the responses, giving you qualitative insights at scale. Remesh can help you save tons of time and resources and still get huge results for your market research.

Pricing: Get in touch with their team to get pricing information

Key features: 

• Have live conversations with up to a 1000 people at once
• Responses are analyzed by AI
• Ability to analyze open-ended responses in real-time

Pros:

• Multi-language, so go international!
• Also suitable for employee research

Cons:

• Can be trickier to use
• Watch out for bots or professional survey takers
• Not really suitable for smaller companies
• Can be quite technical for beginners

3. Make My Persona HubSpot

You don’t just want to gather data, you want to create customer profiles that are practical, for every team in your business. One of the ways to do that is by creating a buyer’s persona, and Hubspot made a handy tool for it. It’s great to do this for your sales and marketing team, but also your customer relationship management and customer service reps.

You create a customer profile using a step-by-step customer profile template. You can add your own sections as well, if you have extra customer data to add.

Pricing: it’s free!

Key features:

• Create a persona in 7 simple steps
• Easy to use interface
• Pick an avatar and add demographic info

Pros:

• Honestly, it’s fun to use
• Visualizing your persona can make it easier to work with it

Cons:

• You’re limited in the type of data you can add
• For a free tool, those are all the cons

4. Google Surveys 360

Google Surveys 360 is a win-win: while you gather valuable insights from people browsing the web, those people get access to premium content. You can create your survey in three simple steps, and the tool starts gathering data right away. Great if you’re looking for accurate and recent data.

Pricing: ​​You pay per completed response basis, and the price is based on the audience you want to reach.

Key features: 

• Advanced geographic targeting: Target your respondents by zip code.
• User-list targeting helps you get to know specific consumers even better
• Respondents are incentivized by getting access to premium content when filling out a survey

Pros:

• Ease of use
• Integrates easily with other tools like Analytics, Search Ads 360, Google Ads

Cons:

• The pricing can be a bit tricky to determine beforehand
• Limited survey design options
• The service is shutting down on November 1 2022

5. Latana

How many times are you on your phone during the day? Exactly. A lot. Latana uses this to send customer surveys to mobile devices, so you’re always in front of your target group. They give you access to 4 billion mobile users in over 100 countries.

Pricing: Latana does not mention pricing or plans on their website, so reach out to their sales team for more information.

Key features: 

• Mobile-optimized surveys
• Niche targeting options
• Super easy to use

Pros:

• Huge audience
• Great for quick surveys

Cons:

• Not suitable for in-depth surveys or long questionnaires
• Smartphone users aren’t always keen on doing surveys, this might affect their answers

6. SurveyMonkey

One of the most well-known survey platforms is SurveyMonkey, which can help a great deal in collecting consumer insights. You get access to integrated panels accessing 144M+ people in over 130 countries.

Pricing: Their Team Advantage plan costs $30 a month, per user, billed annually. Check out their other plans.

Key features:

• Easily create and send surveys
• Collect responses via weblink, email, mobile chat, social media and more
• Automatically analyze your data in their dashboard

Pros:

• Ease of use: everyone can send out a SurveyMonkey
• easy to send to your target group

Cons:

• Limited customization options
• Need to pay for premium subscription to access advanced features
  

7. Toluna

Toluna is a tool that covers all things consumer insights. You can learn about ​​customer satisfaction and loyalty, determine the size of your market, get your NPS and walk the customer journey. 

Pricing: It’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so reach out to their team so schedule a demo and discuss price.

Key features:

• Engage in live discussions with your customers
• Draw insights from their global panel of 40+ million
• Interactive dashboard with in-platform analytic capabilities

Pros:

• Ease of use
• All-in-one tool for customer insights

Cons:

• Not the strongest reporting tool
• Expensive for small businesses

8. Think with Google

Google makes the list twice! This ‘tool’ is a little different from the rest, because it doesn’t actually enable you to talk to your customers. Think with Google is the go-to place for up-to-date and surprising articles on anything consumer insights. Don’t miss out on this great customer profile resource to get your research started.

Pricing: Free!

Key features: 

• Google researchers do the legwork for you
• Insights in consumer journey and consumer trends
• Data from the largest search engine in the world

Pros:

• A free resource, created by great researchers
• Easy to navigate

Cons:

• Secondhand data, so not directly applicable to your customers and your brand’s needs
• It’s almost unfair to point out more cons on a free resource, so we won’t

9. Pollfish

Another mobile-focused customer profiling software is Pollfish: this tool presents your respondents with your survey while they’re using certain apps on their phone, for instance, while playing a game. This makes it great for quick surveys. You get access to 250 million+ real consumers around the world, so you’ll get a good idea of what the majority is thinking.

Pricing: The cheapest Pollfish pricing starts at $95 a month, which gives you 100 respondents, and up to five questions per survey. 

Key features: 

• Mobile-first, presenting surveys in third-party apps
• Easy to set up, and quick to collect responses
• Uses organic sampling surveying

Pros:

• Advanced questionnaire logic ensures that your surveys are tailored to each individual respondent. 
• A/B testing capabilities

Cons:

• Not suitable for long, in-depth surveys
• You can’t be sure people aren’t just answering quickly to get back to their apps

10. 11Ants

Are you running a loyalty program? Then 11Ants is for you! Don’t leave all the data in your loyalty program unused. 11Ants takes the data generated by your loyalty program and transforms it into a company-wide asset, so you benefit even more from that program.

Pricing: You need to reach out to get info on pricing, but they do advertise a free trial using your own data.

Key features: 

• Leverages data from retailer loyalty programs
• Consumer scoring module lets you identify the most promising target groups
• Micro segment builder for detailed segments and plans of action

Pros:

• Get the most out of your loyalty program
• First-hand data from real customers

Cons:

• Only suitable if you have a loyalty program with enough customers
• Doesn’t look into customers who aren’t members of your loyalty program

11. Facebook Insights

We can’t forget the value a lot of social media platforms add to customer profiling. Their tools are often free and can give you great insights into your target group, fans and customers. Facebook Insights is one of those tools you shouldn’t overlook. Dive into it to see what data there is on your customers, before you pay for an expensive tool to tell you the same thing.

Pricing: if you have a Facebook business page, you get free access to the analytics tools

Key features:

• Connect info on your content to customers
• Easy to use and filter
• Handy dashboard with extensive data

Pros:

• It’s a free tool that comes with every Facebook Business page.
• You get pretty detailed info on your audience

Cons:

• It can be hard to filter specifically for customers
• You rely on one data point, namely Facebook

Choosing the right customer profiling software for your brand

Customer profiling software can be a great asset for your business, but it’s important to choose the right tool for your needs. We’ve looked at some of the most popular options on the market, and we hope that this has helped you make a decision about which one is right for you. If you’re still not sure, don’t hesitate to contact us or try out Attest for free to see if it’s right for you!