One of the keys to succeeding in social media marketing is understanding your targeted audience in order to find better ways to connect with it. But what is the best way to understand your audience?

Sometimes it takes too much time and effort, and professional researches demand a fortune for the help with the surveys. You feel like falling into a pit of despair?

Fear not! Here are 9 survey tools that will do the job.

Did we mention all of those are free?

Check them out:

1. Typeform

Typeform surveys are colorful, intuitive and easy to grasp. The visuals are superb, and even a child can navigate through the website. All you need is sit back and enjoy it.

2. Survey Monkey

Do you need simple, yes-or-no survey? Or perhaps a huge questionnaire with 10 possible answers to each of 1000 questions? Survey Monkey can do both. First 10 questions and 100 responses are free. Everything else you can get for only $25/month.

3. Surveypal 

Plain. Simple. Convenient. Fast.

What else do you need?

4. Proved.co

The best way to check if your idea for a startup, book, app or game is worth developing (time and money, too). Proved.co will give you a feedback and help you decide!

5. Personapp 

Helps you divide targeted audience by age, behavior, preferences, goals.

6. Up Close & Persona

Up Close & Persona tool helps to create even more detailed profiles for diffe rent personas within your targeted audience.

7. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report

This tool pulls up a thorough analysis of your friends’ posts and updates. Helps you understand the audience to the extent you’ve never dreamed of.

8. Facebook Audience Insights

This Facebook-created tool uses all the might of Zukerberg’s platform to create any target demographic based on age, gender, region, preferences and tastes. Makes it easy to understand which group likes your page the most and who is missing.

9. Followerwonk

The Audience Insights’ Twitter version. Age, gender, region, preferences and tastes plus hashtags and activities.

You might’ve heard that knowledge is power. That saying is old but no less true. To connect with your audience you need to understand – and with these tools you won’t even have to pay for it.

So:

- Launch your browser

- Choose the tool you like the most

- Conduct the survey

 - Analyze the data and the feedback

- Reform your strategy

- Get the awesome results!