How To Conduct Industry Research In 7 Simple Steps

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Are you looking to enhance your writing skills and write more efficient papers, summaries, and articles using AI tools? Research skills are essential for success in various fields, including writing. Industry Research is a vital component of this equation, helping you gather accurate and reliable information to support your content.

This guide dives into industry research and how it can enhance your writing game, making your work more accurate and impactful. Whether you're a seasoned writer or just venturing into the writing world, understanding and mastering Industry Research can significantly enhance your writing and research skills. Let's explore how you can harness the power of research to level up your writing!

Unriddle offers a beneficial solution for enhancing your writing and research skills - the AI research assistant. This tool can help you streamline your research process, enabling you to gather relevant and reliable information efficiently. By leveraging AI technology, you can enhance your writing speed and quality, produce more accurate content, and improve your research skills. This AI-powered assistant can provide valuable insights and recommendations to help you craft compelling and well-researched content.

What Is Industry Research?

Industry research (or analysis) collects information about a specific industry and its factors. Companies conduct industry research to understand their position, competition, and external factors shaping the industry. Industry research provides insight into current market dynamics such as supply and demand, the extent of competition within and outside the industry, and potential future opportunities.

The research helps companies understand the internal and external factors affecting their industry, giving them a clearer picture of the industry's current and future operations. Companies can stay informed about market trends, consumer behavior, emerging technologies, and competitor strategies through industry research. By staying ahead of these developments, companies can better adapt to changes, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks.

Industry research is essential for making informed business decisions, setting realistic goals, and developing effective strategies to achieve sustainable growth. Industry research is a continuous process that requires companies to stay updated on the latest developments in their industry. By monitoring industry data, trends, and consumer preferences, companies can anticipate changes and adapt their business models accordingly.

In today's fast-paced business environment, industry research is crucial for businesses to remain competitive, innovative, and profitable. Industry research is an essential tool for companies looking to gain a competitive edge, identify growth opportunities, and navigate the complexities of their industry. By investing time and resources in industry research, companies can make informed decisions, reduce risks, and drive long-term success.

What Is The Importance Of Industry Research?

1. Get the ‘Lay of the Land’

Industry research is crucial for anyone unfamiliar with a specific industry. It will provide a comprehensive overview, outlining key statistics such as revenue, profit, profit margin, employment and wages, products and services, and significant players. Understanding these fundamental aspects will give you a quick overview. Moreover, looking at growth rates is crucial since they help you grasp the bigger picture.

2. Guide Strategic Decisions

Many decision-makers rely on previous experience and instincts to inform their thinking and planning. However, incorporating data and analysis into decision-making processes is just as crucial. Stakeholders must understand the bigger picture and be able to back up their conclusions and decisions with data. Independent industry research can significantly reduce risks around significant decisions.

3. Determine Benchmarks

How does your company compare to its competitors? How does its performance measure up against the industry average? Industry benchmarking is essential to assess performance accurately. It's a systematic process identifying best practices from competitors or similar industries. This allows for detailed comparisons between companies and industries, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of successes, failures, and areas needing improvement.

4. Identify Industry Trends

Industries are ever-evolving, and staying ahead of the curve requires tracking industry trends. While raw, static data is helpful, more is needed to provide the complete picture. Examining the past five years of revenue growth in an industry can help you understand its health and the opportunities it presents.

5. Understand Competition

Understanding your competition is crucial whether you're a small business or a large corporation. Researching the market will enable you to evaluate your category, strategize effectively, and make informed decisions to give your company a competitive edge.

6. Discover Non-Financial Information

Finding financial information through their 10Ks and tax filings is relatively easy for public companies. However, extrapolating this to understand industry performance can be challenging. It's vital to find information on private companies and government entities as well as non-financial information like structural, growth, and sensitivity risk. This includes insights into upstream or downstream supply chains, major product markets, and other essential details that can influence your strategy.

7. Look Into the Future to Predict Performance

The performance of an industry is a significant indicator of how well a business will do within that industry. If the industry thrives, individual companies will also have higher chances to perform well. This is why tracking industry performance can help predict how well your business might fare.

Incorporating data and analysis into decision-making processes is crucial. Stakeholders must understand the bigger picture and be able to back up their conclusions and decisions with data. Independent industry research can significantly reduce risks around significant decisions.

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How To Conduct Industry Research In 8 Simple Steps

1. Identify a Need

When beginning industry research, the first step is to identify a need. This is finding an information gap that your original research could fill. To uncover these information gaps, think about topics you want to know more about but cannot find quality information on, heavily covered topics in your industry still lacking definitive insights, questions from your customer groups deserving further exploration, emerging trends in your industry lacking research, potential insights from your owned data, and essential topics for your brand that should be covered in benchmark reports.

2. Set Goals for Your Industry Research

Setting goals is vital for directing your industry research and achieving its intended ROI. To establish your industry research goal, reflect on the original need you identified and the purpose behind conducting industry research. For instance, are you aiming to educate customers on a crucial product-related topic, understand buyer behavior, build authority with better research on an already extensively covered topic, or be a pioneer in covering an emerging trend in your industry?

3. Build Your Team

The next step is to determine who will carry out your research. Your marketing team will typically lead the effort regarding industry research for content marketing. Identify which members of the marketing team will participate in executing the research. You may also include others from your organization with the necessary expertise or access to information to contribute to the research. For instance, data analysts could help access owned data.

4. Establish Your Methods

The subsequent step involves deciding the methods you will use for your industry research. The methods might vary based on the topic, and you can combine research methods to achieve comprehensive results. For example, if your topic concerns buyer behavior, you might send a survey to collect data while also analyzing historical data about your customers that you own.

5. Create a Plan

Developing a documented plan is crucial for setting deadlines, assigning responsibility, and keeping your team accountable throughout the research process. It also prevents essential tasks from falling through the cracks. Your plan can be simple, but a simple Google sheet with assignments and deadlines will suffice. It should be shared and regularly updated to keep your research process on track.

6. Execute Your Plan

It's time to execute your plan after building the necessary building blocks. Establish a schedule for your research team to meet and check periodically. Refer to your documented plan to ensure everything runs smoothly and stays on schedule.

7. Analyze Results

Following the execution of your research plan, it's time to analyze your results. Refer back to your original research goals to guide the data analysis process. As a research team, review your collected data and determine the most relevant and important ways to analyze it. This step is best carried out with support from data analysis tools that can help automate the process and ensure accuracy.

8. Distribute and Amplify

Lastly, you should strategically distribute your original industry research. Industry research is more valuable than a standard blog or email content, so leverage it effectively to drive traffic and grow your audience. Consider using your research report as a gated lead magnet to attract new leads.

You can write blog posts and social media content that include excerpts from your research to drive interest and direct people to your website for the full content. This approach ensures your content remains accessible and enhances the ROI from new leads. Additionally, amplify your research by creating related content on your blog, social platforms, and email.

10 Best Tools To Help You With Industry Research

1. Unriddle AI - For Writing Industry Reports

Unriddle AI lets you quicken your reading pace and enhance your writing skills. It simplifies complex topics, helps in note-taking, and improves your writing with the help of AI. With Unriddle, you can access an AI assistant to locate, summarize, and comprehend information faster without endless skimming.

The tool grasps the meaning behind your writing and automatically links you to pertinent information from your past readings and writings. By highlighting text, Unriddle can display the most relevant sources from your library using AI, enabling you never to lose a citation again. You can also generate text using AI autocomplete to enhance and expand your writing with all context-based suggestions. Furthermore, you can work collaboratively in a shared workspace where everyone can contribute and chat in real time with the same documents using Unriddle.

2. Statista - For Research and Statistics

Statista is a valuable resource offering data trends and reports across various topics and interests, ranging from Facebook’s monthly active users to leading beer brands based on sales. The platform covers more than 170 industries and 150 countries. What sets Statista apart is its visualizations, with all statistics presented in neat and comprehensive graphs ready for publication or sharing in your reports.

This feature makes it easy to observe trends over time or quickly gather insights about consumer preferences. With various charts available and regular updates, Statista also briefly explains the findings and suggests related charts for further research.

3. Market Finder - For Exploring and Comparing Different Markets

Market Finder, a free tool by Google, simplifies the discovery of international markets with potential for expansion. Rather than focusing on specific trends, Market Finder unveils new regions and demographics with solid growth potential. This tool is ideal for businesses seeking to widen their reach and identify marketing opportunities in untapped regions. Investors can also utilize Market Finder to identify new regions offering promising investment opportunities.

4. Census Bureau - For Census Data

The Census Bureau offers a free resource for exploring U.S. census data. Users can filter data by age, income, year, and location. Shortcuts are available to access data visualizations, allowing you to identify potential target markets nationwide promptly. If you are considering a highly competitive product or service, the Census Bureau makes it easy to determine where your target industry is most popular or where the market has become oversaturated.

5. Tableau - For Organizing Data

Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to connect with almost any data source. The data isn't presented in traditional tables but visualized in a manner that helps you derive insights, engage external stakeholders, and demonstrate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.

Whether you want to analyze corn production in tropical climates or office product sales in North America, Tableau offers tools to investigate potential marketplaces and supplier regions at granular and general levels.

6. Paperform - For Conducting Surveys

Paperform is an excellent tool for conducting market research surveys to understand your target audience better. These surveys enable you to gather objective and accurate responses directly from your audience. With a user-friendly free-text interface, Paperform simplifies the survey creation process, allowing you to customize colors, fonts, layouts, and themes to create a unique survey appearance.

Offering over 27 question fields types such as ranking, matrix, or scale fields, Paperform enables you to create visually appealing surveys that collect more information and achieve higher completion rates. Expertly-made questionnaires and market research survey templates are available for beginners to kickstart the survey creation process.

7. Pew Research Center - For Market Research

The Pew Research Center, a non-profit organization, specializes in research and data analysis across various fields, including US politics, opinion polling, social and demographic trends, news and media, science, religion, and technology. The organization's research is thorough and highly usable and provides intriguing insights into human behavior and thought processes through articles like 'The Metaverse in 2040' and' 10 Facts about Americans and Twitter.' The Pew Research Center offers valuable information for businesses across diverse interests.

8. SEMRush - For Industry Insights

SEMrush is a comprehensive market research tool primarily focusing on improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. With over 40 tools under its portfolio catering to SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, and Content Marketing, SEMrush helps marketers attract more visitors and enhance conversions. This tool is ideal for marketers aiming to boost conversion rates and enhance their online presence through various marketing strategies.

9. Upwave - For Analytics

Upwave, formerly known as Survata, offers one of the best analytics and market research platforms to measure the impact of brand advertising campaigns. With an inbuilt dashboard, you can track campaigns across multiple channels, optimize them, and enhance return on investment. Data from Upwave has been featured in renowned publications like Forbes, USA Today, CBS News, and The New York Times, making it a trusted resource for measuring advertising campaign effectiveness.

Social Mention is a valuable tool for market research that scours through over 100 social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress, to track the number of times your brand or keyword has been mentioned. This tool accurately tracks and measures what people say about your brand, providing insights into brand perception and online presence. Social Mention is a robust tool for monitoring and analyzing social media conversations surrounding your brand or industry.

Complete Step-by-Step Guide On How To Use Unriddle's AI Research Tool

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use Unriddle. I’ve also copied it below :)

From here, it's pretty simple.

Unriddle helps you read, write and learn faster.

Interact with documents via AI so you can quickly find and understand info.

Then start writing in a new Note and Unriddle will show you relevant content from your library as you type.

Get started by uploading a document.

Or read on for the full rundown.

Interact with documents

When you upload a document, Unriddle generates an AI assistant on top of this data.

Click 'New' in the right sidebar and then select 'Upload' to get started.

Use this assistant to answer specific questions about the text, summarize content and simplify jargon.

The trick is to be super clear about what you want.

If you're summarizing a research paper, for example, instead of saying “Summarize” or “Summarize this research paper”, say something like “Explain this research paper to me in simple terms. What method did the researchers use? What did they find? Why does it matter?”.

The second prompt will produce a much better overview of the paper because we're giving the AI more hints about what we want.

Automatic relations

Unriddle grasps the context behind each Note and Document in your library and automatically links them based on meaning.

Let's say you have a collection of nuclear physics papers in your library.

When you start writing a note about The Manhattan Project, simply mentioning "The Manhattan Project" will prompt Unriddle to find the connection between this note and the nuclear physics papers.

Even if you didn't explicitly mention the research papers, Unriddle's knowledge of Oppenheimer, his work, and the significant relevance of these papers means it understands the connection and automatically links them together.

In short, Unriddle shows you relevant content from your library at the exact moment you need it, even if you haven't explicitly mentioned it.

Citing your sources

Writing is hard when you have a ton of sources to track.

So we made it easy.

Highlight some text, click ‘Cite’ and you’ll see items from your library that contain information related to the selection of text you just highlighted as determined by our AI.

When you select an item Unriddle inserts a link into highlighted text that, when clicked, takes you to the referenced item.

Writing with AI

Click ‘New’ in the sidebar and hit ‘Note’ to open up a new note.

Here you’ll find all the text formatting options you’re used to and more.

Type ‘++’ to generate text based on the context of what’s already written.

Highlight text and click ‘Ask AI’ to open up the AI menu where you’ll find options to improve, expand, summarize and explain.

You can type custom prompts too!

Finally, you can open any note in a pane on the right side of the screen while interacting with documents. Just click the orange pencil icon at the top of the chat window.

Adjust the model, temperature and response length in the Setting sidebar.

Click the cog icon in the top right corner of the screen and look for "Chat Settings".

These apply across all documents but you can easily flip between them regardless of settings at the time of upload.

Model: the machine learning model used to generate responses.

Temperature: the amount of creative license you give to the AI.

Max length: the maximum number of words generated in a response.

Got feedback or questions? Send us an email and we'll get back to you within a day.

— Naveed

Where To Find Industry Information?

Looking for industry information? Well, do not worry, as there are several sources where you can delve into the vibrant tapestry of industry research. Remember that a lot of information can be found online about an industry – industry associations and trade groups, industry consultants, lobbyists, company websites that may contain industry information, random articles, third-party companies that perform industry research, and more.

However, navigating the complexities of industry information can be overwhelming - it’s hard to know what is accurate, unbiased, and up-to-date when sifting through online search results. No matter how or where you find it, industry information should inform you about various aspects. Here are a few critical points that industry information should inform you about:

Key Players/Companies

Knowing who the key players and companies within an industry are can give you a head start in understanding the market landscape. This information can help you understand the industry's competitive dynamics and market share concentration.

Industry Financial Benchmarks and Key Financial Ratios

Understanding the financial benchmarks and key financial ratios of an industry can help gain insight into the performance of various companies within the industry. It can also shed light on the industry's economic health as a whole.

Industry Growth, Performance, and Life Cycle

Understanding an industry's growth, performance, and life cycle can help you assess its potential for investment or entry. Evaluating an industry's maturity can also aid in predicting future trends and opportunities.

Analyzing the competitors, market share concentration, and competitive dynamics within an industry can help you identify potential threats and opportunities. Knowledge of the competitive landscape is crucial for making informed business decisions.

Barriers to Entry

Recognizing the barriers to entry within an industry is vital for assessing the feasibility of entering the market. This information can help you evaluate the risks and challenges of starting a business in that industry.

Major Markets and Products

Understanding an industry's major markets and products can help you identify growth opportunities and consumer trends. This information can guide strategic decisions related to product development and market expansion.

External Forces Impacting the Industry

Identifying the external forces that impact the industry, such as government regulations or the prices of key inputs, can help you anticipate potential challenges and trends and prepare for changes in the market environment.

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What Is The Difference Between Industry Research and Market Research?

Industry and market research focus on allocating goods and services, but their perspectives differ. Market research concentrates on the customer, while industry research examines the producer or vendor. Both types of research analyze market share, competitors, industry size, business environment, and risks. Market research delves into demographics and consumer behavior, whereas industry research targets top products, processes, and threat analysis to identify opportunities within the market.

Alternative Target Audiences for Market and Industry Analysis

Industry Research

Industry research focuses on higher-level manufacturers and compares a business with its competitors. It analyzes the top products and competitor strategies to identify opportunities and threats. Competition analysis in industry research examines how competitors innovate to gain an edge.

Market Research

Market research focuses on a business’s buyers and sellers, looking at demographics and consumer responses to trends and products. A market analysis targets the company’s demographic and consumer behavior rather than focusing on competitor strategies.

Key Metrics to Track

Industry Research

Key competitors, industry growth, and trends are crucial metrics to track in industry research. By comparing competitor success and evaluating industry growth and trends, businesses can identify opportunities and threats within the industry.

Market Research

Market demographics, consumer behavior, and market trends are key metrics to track in market research. Understanding the target consumer’s demographics, behavior, and trends that impact consumer behavior is crucial for business success.

Research Strategies

Industry Research Strategies

SWOT analysis, competitive forces model, and broad factor analysis are popular research models for industry analysis. These strategies help companies evaluate their internal performance, industry trends, and competitive opportunities.

Market Research Strategies

Customer research methods like social listening and competitive analysis are common market research strategies. Market mapping and competitive analysis helps businesses understand their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, enhancing their competitive advantage.

Read Faster & Write Better With Unriddle for Free Today

Unriddle is a transformative tool that helps you read faster and write better. With Unriddle, you can quickly find information in documents, simplify complex topics, take notes, and write with the power of AI. In today's fast-paced world, researchers and students need all the help they can get to stay ahead of the game, and Unriddle provides just that. Let's dive into how Unriddle can transform the way you approach research.

AI Assistant for Quick Information Retrieval

Unriddle generates an AI assistant on top of any document, allowing you to find, summarize, and understand information quickly. No more endless skimming through lengthy texts. Unriddle understands the meaning behind your writing and automatically links you to relevant things you've read and written about. This feature ensures you can effortlessly connect the dots in your research and build on existing knowledge.

Effortless Source Highlighting and Citation Management

Highlight text, and Unriddle AI will show you the most relevant sources from your library using AI. This feature is a game-changer for anyone needing help keeping track of citations and sources. You will never lose a citation again, thanks to Unriddle's intelligent highlighting and linking capabilities. This tool is vital for researchers looking to maintain a well-organized and credible bibliography.

AI-Autocomplete for Improved Writing

Generate text with AI autocomplete to enhance and expand your writing. All suggestions are based on the context of your work, ensuring that your writing is cohesive and well-informed. The AI autocomplete feature is handy when you're stuck on a sentence or paragraph and need a nudge in the right direction. Unriddle's AI capabilities provide invaluable support for refining your writing skills and creating compelling narratives.

Collaborative Workspace for Real-Time Collaboration

Step into a collaborative workspace where everyone can contribute and chat with the same documents in real time. This feature fosters teamwork and seamless communication, making group projects more manageable and efficient. With Unriddle, you can coordinate efforts, share insights, and brainstorm ideas with peers in one centralized platform. The collaborative workspace is a testament to Unriddle's commitment to empowering researchers and students with innovative tools.

Unriddle is a must-have tool for anyone looking to elevate their research skills and streamline their writing process. By leveraging AI technology, Unriddle offers a comprehensive suite of features that cater to the diverse needs of researchers and students. From quick information retrieval to enhanced writing capabilities, Unriddle is a game-changer in research tools. Enhance your research experience today by trying Unriddle for free and unlocking a world of possibilities.