While much of what we do at HelloInfo is focused on supporting clients’ questions to help inform strategic decisions at a point in time, there are also ways we can support teams to keep apprised of ongoing competitor and market developments. HelloInfo’s Analytical Newsletters help client teams identify opportunities and ensure strategic decisions are not suddenly derailed by market or competitor developments.
Before we get into depth on how we approach custom newsletters, let’s cover some of the basics:
What is market monitoring?
Market monitoring is a formalized, ongoing program designed to collect insights on your competitors, customers, other players in your value chain, or your market landscape. Monitoring keeps your team apprised of events taking place across the ecosystem in which you operate.
Market monitoring can be quite broad and inclusive, serving a number of teams or audiences, or it can be very focused on a specific set of competitors or customers.
There are many companies out there that offer formal market monitoring programs, which typically couple this service with a software platform that is used to distribute and archive the insights. Sometimes these programs are fully automated, relying on search strings and algorithms to generate content within the predefined scope. Others use automated solutions on the backend, but add an analyst review to the automated content with the purpose of eliminating duplicate content or to provide other filtering.
Can’t AI do this? Why do I need Analytical Newsletters?
While there are many automated solutions used to gather and deliver market and competitive intelligence available in the market, adding an analytical layer to the process has some distinct advantages:
- Increased quality of the output: When a service is automated, you can cast the net wide, but then your audience can be inundated with irrelevant content, ultimately diluting the purpose of your efforts. If you narrow the search too much, you may miss out on potentially impactful content. Analyst teams reviewing content provide an additional filter to content that increases the quality of the insights shared.
- Added value to the output: Automated deliverables typically offer a link list of articles, or brief computer-generated summaries. It is hard to justify the price of such a service when the output is a relatively generic set of links or articles. Adding an analyst layer enables your targeted content to be supplemented with critical interpretation, company-specific context, or links to other related content.
- Ability to flexibly shift scope: Automated monitoring services are often based on set lists of companies or topics that are defined at the outset of the service. There is little to no ability to adjust as your market changes, but today even traditionally slow industries are changing and being disrupted at record speed. Deploying an analyst-generated newsletter approach enables you to deploy shifts to your content perspective in a moment’s notice.
- Increased engagement: While automatically-generated newsletters can be good at presenting facts, they also lack personality. At HelloInfo, we are often asked to produce analyst-generated newsletters that are written in a way that will interest the readers, pique their curiosity, or even make them laugh!
An alternate approach to automated market monitoring: Analytical Newsletters
Analytical Newsletters are HelloInfo’s take on market monitoring. Rather than being a broad, yet shallow news monitoring service, this newsletter service offers our clients a detailed look at their market in an easy-to-consume format. Typically, the audience of our Analytical Newsletters are very specific teams or individuals who need to stay on top market or competitor events.
What does the Analytical Newsletter process entail?
There are many really great email newsletters out there today that can help keep you informed of general news developments. Think of The Hustle, theSkimm, and Axios. Imagine a similar styled newsletter, but with content tailored directly to you and your team.
The HelloInfo team starts by collecting news on your market and competitors and sifts through for the most relevant items. The focus is not on a predefined set of companies or products, but rather is based on an understanding of your business and what could impact your company.
Typically delivered weekly, a newsletter opens with an engaging and interesting introduction that will draw your reader(s) in and summarize what is to come. The newsletter itself will contain a handful of custom-written summaries about news events that are expected to impact your business. The focus of these summaries will be not only on what happened, but why it happened, and how it will potentially impact your business in the future. In addition to these analytical summaries, links to other important news items, competitor webpages, or industry though leadership are provided to create a holistic narrative about the state of your business.
As with anything HelloInfo does, the format, tone, content, and frequency will be defined by you and your team, ensuring the deliverables will keep your team apprised of market developments in an easy to consume format.
Schedule a meeting with HelloInfo to see an example of an Analytical Newsletter, or to talk further about how we can help you and your team stay on top of market and competitor developments.
