Summary
A major global consulting firm wanted to implement a competitive intelligence program to monitor competitors’ thought leadership (TL) landscape, merger & acquisition activities, and strategic alliances.
Evalueserve implemented a customized version of our Insightsfirst competitive intelligence platform for the client. Insightsfirst tracks the thought leadership (TL) content released by their competition, which helps the client develop and drive content strategies.
The Challenge
Increasingly, professional services firms realize the need to monitor competitors’ content to develop their firm’s content marketing strategy. A global management consulting firm wanted a platform to track and analyze their competitors’ TL content, media traction, and white spaces.
Before our engagement, the client’s teams monitored the competition’s TL content in the relevant sectors at a microproject level.
Our client did not have a structured program to monitor articles, podcasts, webinars, webcasts, and videos published by the competition. The client also did not have a mechanism for tracking their competitors’ bylined content.
To address these needs, the client wanted a centralized and easy-to-search solution that would track competitors’ published TL content in one place. The end objective was to improve overall marketing strategy, go-to-market plans, client-facing engagements, and service planning efforts.
Our Solution
To begin our engagement, Evalueserve conducted a four-month-long proof of concept (PoC), validating and problem-solving the client requirement. To fulfill that requirement, we implemented our comprehensive competitive intelligence platform, Insightsfirst.
Insightsfirst featured a searchable, indexed, and tagged dashboard of competitive global and regional publications, M&A and alliances activities, and social media.
The client’s customized Insightsfirst platform:
- Pulls relevant information and data from close to 30,000 publications. This data can be filtered, sorted, searched, benchmarked, and extracted.
- Compares and analyzes publishing activities with trends for practices/sectors.
- Ranks leading TL content by media share (sum of Facebook share, Twitter share, and traditional media share).
- Ranks competitors by media share across more than 30 practices.
- Provides insight into what articles are gaining media traction.
- Ranks and compares M&A activities by competitor, deal size, practice, and sub-practice.
- Allows for export of data to Excel sheets in just a few clicks.
- Gives users access to a plethora of content from 15 competitors for more than 30 practices on a single source.
The client’s Insightsfirst platform is updated with global TL publications and their media traction data every week. Regional TL publications and M&A and alliances activities are updated on the platform once a month.
After we met the client’s requirements in the PoC, Evalueserve was officially brought on, beginning with a 50-user subscription. The continued success of the Insightsfirst platform has led to a multi-year contract that provides for enterprise-wide use.
The key Insightsfirst CI features leveraged in this project include:
- Features and customizations are offered and updated based on client feedback.
- An AI-based data collection engine detects and extracts TL content from over 350 official websites/sources.
- Machine and deep learning minimize human errors and ensure high relevancy and reliability.
- The “Ask the Analyst” option allows users to submit requests for additional research.
Business Impact
Over 100 of the client’s content professionals across different regions and practices use Insightsfirst. Nearly 75% of those users rated Insightsfirst as “extremely useful.” Insightsfirst helped the client solidify its marketing strategy and identify opportunities to release TL content in white spaces the competition is not covering. The platform also analyzes traditional and social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to rank and compare the competition’s thought leadership efforts and their success.
Platform rated as “extremely useful”
by 74% of users.
Tracks over 350 websites/sources
for TL content.
400 new TL content pieces
are added every week.