Case Study

Creating Research Reports in Niche Segments Using Market Intelligence Platform

Learn how a leading market research firm used Contify to carry out secondary research that went into producing reports on niche industry segments

About The Company

Headquartered in California, this global market intelligence, research and advisory company is best known for publishing reports on niche industry segments – the kind of segments that other research companies shy away from because data collection is extremely difficult.

Their focus on emerging trends in technology that are likely to disrupt the dynamics of the market over the next 5 or 10 years makes their research reports highly sought after across industries.

Business Challenge - How Secondary Research Slowed the Team Down

While the intelligence team were busy crafting best-selling reports, the pace of secondary research, the quantity (or the lack of it) and the abysmal quality of information had significantly slowed the company down as they continued foraying into more micro-segments.

Some of these segments include Cell-Free DNA Isolation And Extraction, Precision Medicine, and Automotive MEMS Sensor etc. While undertaking secondary research for writing these reports, the team was facing the following key challenges:

Lack of Media Coverage

While large industries are often covered in news reports, the niche segments aren’t particularly newsworthy or of mass appeal, and hence rarely covered. This makes Google almost unusable for research. Here’s a snapshot of results for Automotive MEMS Sensors. As you can notice, a Google search returns mostly press releases about reports published on this segment by other research firms.

Lack of Media Coverage

 

Lack of Coverage in Research Databases

The companies that make up these niche segments are usually small and therefore not covered by research databases. As a result, while the firm was able to use their database subscriptions for research on large companies, they weren’t much help when writing reports in these segments.

The Solution

The firm started looking for a solution that could serve as a tool to specifically aid in research on niche segments. Here’s how the Contify’s competitive intelligence tool met the research firm’s requirements:

Company tracking

In terms of functionality, Contify’s market intelligence platform is built around company tracking. A research analyst can simply log into the platform, add the companies that she needs to track, and voila – the platform will generate a feed of real-time intelligence on these companies.

Unlike traditional research databases, which require a user to write complex search queries to find useful information on companies, Contify’s company tracking comes pre-built with search queries that have been refined over years by our analysts and machine learning algorithms over years to surface information that qualifies as intelligence.

Custom topics

The research firm was tracking over a thousand companies. But in every research category, they only wanted to get information for the companies that was about said categories.

For instance, they were tracking General Motors under the electric vehicles category. But instead of having to deal with a firehose of information on the company, they only wanted updates that pertained to General Motors’ work in the electric vehicles market.

In order to source information in this restricted and targeted fashion, our analyst team created custom topics based on a combination of several keywords. One of the research categories was precision medicine under which 300+ companies were being tracked.

Examples of keywords used to source relevant information for this category included Precision Medicine, Personalized Medicine, Targeted Therapeutics, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), Gene Therapy, Molecular Diagnostics, Companion Diagnostics, Precision Drug Oncology, EHR/EMR

Pharmacogenomics, and several more. Examples of articles sourced under precision medicine include:

The Impact of Using Dedicated Market Intelligence Service

With the help of Contify, the firm was able to give its analysts access to all the secondary research they needed to write the reports in real time. Contify also made it easier for the analysts to refresh the reports by sending timely alerts based on which the firm could incorporate critical new developments in the reports.

Further, powered by Contify, the California-based company was able to expand its reporting on smaller companies that weren’t being covered in the news media but were publishing content on their own websites and social media channels. The research firm now tracks well over a 1000 companies across precision medicine, electric vehicles, biotech, healthcare IT, and space tech.

Learn more about Contify