Top Market Research Challenges

Market research and the processes it entails have dramatically transformed over the past decade. In the age of information overload,  no longer is it enough to collect and sort through endless streams of information. Today, the real task becomes separating crucial or relevant insights from the noise—and doing so faster than your competitors.

However, many businesses have not realized this reality, still digging a tunnel with a teaspoon . By relying on manual methods of market research and neglecting tools that could enhance and accelerate their research, companies are choosing to be reactive, rather than proactive.

Below, we dive into the top market research challenges that corporate, financial services, and consulting professionals face in their day-to-day, as well as our solutions to overcoming them.

Top Market Research Challenges

Siloed Content in Disparate Locations

More often than not, professionals  conducting market research have to rely on multiple sources scattered across disparate locations. This is problematic for several reasons.

First, manually toggling between multiple sources increases the likelihood of missing key insights or overlooking connections between data points, simply due to human limitations or potentially unreliable sources. Second, without a centralized platform that provides access to all necessary data, researchers, and analysts will consistently face access barriers, such as privacy restrictions or paywalls. These restrictions are particularly common for some of the most high-value content, such as broker reports or company call transcripts. 

Together, these challenges  leave organizations vulnerable to research blind spots and missed opportunities while wasting valuable time and resources. 

Limited Data Availability

While premium data can be leveraged to give a company a competitive edge in an oversaturated market, it’s often hard to find or even access. Publicly available sources will very rarely provide you with the valuable insights you need for comprehensive and differentiated research. And even if you do come across a resource that provides access to high-value information, you’ll most likely encounter roadblocks (i.e., prohibitive paywall) that prevent you from gaining the full value of these insights.

As a result, organizations that  lack access to premium, proprietary, public, and private sources find themselves at a disadvantage as they struggle to compete with peers who can access the key perspectives of market research.

Tedious, Time-Consuming Work

Traditional market research is much like searching for a needle in a haystack—tiresome, time-consuming, and ultimately, unlikely to yield fruitful results. Manual research leaves researchers and analysts vulnerable to human error and missed insights, while also taking valuable time away from high-value tasks like strategy and analysis. 

Limited Search Experience

Public search engines are not capable of providing comprehensive, holistic market intelligence. Search results are not tailored to unique researcher settings and preferences, and some key sources of information (e.g., private company documents, analyst reports) don’t even show up on public search engines because they require special entitlements to access.

Additionally, sources found on public search engines require manual sifting (and a heavy reliance on CTRL+F) to find keywords or data points—meaning, you could miss certain insights that you didn’t even know to look for. 

Moreover, traditional search engines are not purpose-built for business or financial needs, which means they cannot identify variations in business language or analyze sentiment that could provide deeper insight or context to text. 

Difficulty Separating the Signal From the Noise

With the sheer amount of data available to organizations today, it’s imperative that your market intelligence strategy can cut through the noise and extract insights that are actually relevant to your business strategy. Otherwise, you find yourself bogged down by data, much of which is either irrelevant to your goals or simply unreliable..

However, effectively accomplishing this is a real challenge, as unstructured data makes up the majority of available data. This is why having an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool that can analyze unstructured data and extract critical information is key. Otherwise, you’re leaving crucial business insights on the table for your competitors to take advantage of first.

Reactive Research and Strategy

Far too often, businesses conduct their market research in a reactive way: they look for insights on competitor or market moves once they’ve already happened, and then try to implement a  strategy to respond. This results in playing catch-up with your peers and being at the mercy of unpredictable market events. In order to gain a competitive edge, businesses need to have a proactive approach to market research.

Traditional research methods are not conducive to a proactive strategy. Gathering information  from disparate data sources results in confusion and information overload. Without a way to look at the market holistically, it’s also hard to make inferences on how certain trends impact one another other or predict how the market will react to key events in the future. Thus, the cycle continues—professionals are blindsided by the unexpected and act from an impulsive, reactionary place, which ultimately puts them at  risk for business missteps.

Bias in Data Collection

For professionals relying on manual market research methods, avoiding bias in data collection, sourcing, and strategy implementation is nearly impossible. Human researchers are predisposed to not only select certain resources due to preference,  but are likely to use data that fits with their own research objectives (rather than integrate information that may misalign with one’s argument but is factually correct).

Ultimately, this can lead to skewed data, as well as missed insights researchers were unaware of—leading to negative repercussions for company strategy. A centralized AI-based platform that automatically extracts the most relevant insights from a vast universe of unbiased data is the only way to avoid the pitfalls of manual market research. 

Solving Market Research Challenges With AlphaSense

AlphaSense is an AI-based market intelligence platform that aggregates premium, proprietary, public, and private content in one place—enabling financial research and business professionals to enhance and accelerate their market research.

Here’s how AlphaSense solves the top challenges professionals face today:

Aggregated Access to Premium, Proprietary Content

Challenges Solved: 

• Siloed Content in Disparate Locations
• Limited Data Availability
• Bias in Data Collection

With a platform that provides access to all content necessary for market research, professionals can avoid the possibility of missing key insights or overlooking patterns in data. Instead, a centralized platform provides a big-picture, 360-degree view of a market, industry, company, or trend. And without ever having to worry about paywalls or restrictions, you can collect insights effectively and efficiently.

AlphaSense provides access to the four key perspectives of market research in a variety of content forms:

• Company – 10Qs, earnings call transcripts, ESG reports, global and SEC filings, press releases, and other internal documents
• Analyst – Broker reports (e.g., company reports, market reports, industry reports, and more) published by top Wall Street research firms
• Journalist – News, trade journals, and regulatory documents
• Expert – Tens of thousands of expert call transcripts sharing first-hand company and industry perspectives

AlphaSense has two proprietary content sets that take your market research to the next level:

• Wall Street Insights® – a collection of equity research for corporate use from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them from wasting time and money on potentially fruitless research
• Expert Insights – 45,000+ transcripts of one-on-one calls with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, as well as current and former executives. Research professionals can also conduct their own 1:1 expert calls for less. 

In addition to these sources, you can upload and search through your own content, as part of our Enterprise Intelligence offering, which includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• Investment memos and CIMs
• Meeting and conference notes
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds
• Email content
• Excel documents

By having access to premium external content, coupled with your firm’s internal knowledge, you can increase your research efficiency and be confident that the insights you are using are accurate and reliable. This also helps decrease bias, as you are relying on insights from both primary and secondary sources, and spanning across various perspectives of research. 

AI Search Technology

Challenges Solved:

• Too Time-Consuming and Manual
• Limited Search Experience
• Difficulty Separating the Insights From the Noise
• Bias in Data Collection

In addition to our vast content universe, our platform leverages advanced AI search technology that does all the heavy lifting for you to extract the most meaningful insights, all while filtering out the excess noise. 

Here are some of our key AI features that solve market research challenges:

Semantic Search

AlphaSense’s proprietary AI search technology recognizes the intent of your search and surfaces key insights without you having to perform multiple manual searches or spending time reading through the entirety of long documents. 

Our Smart Synonyms™ technology analyzes speech patterns across tens of millions of search documents, resulting in a robust library of synonymous words. AlphaSense does the legwork of searching for your query, as well as all relevant synonyms, within text-heavy documents.

Sentiment Analysis

Our sentiment analysis technology utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to uncover market perceptions about a given topic. Further, it color-codes positive and negative sentiment for easy recognition as you browse search results. These AI features are executed in seconds, saving analysts precious hours that were previously spent combing through broker reports and other complex datasets.

Generative AI

Unlike other consumer-grade generative AI (genAI) tools trained on publicly available data, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights and leans on 10+ years of AI tech development. 

Our suite of tools currently includes:

• Smart Summaries – This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights, allowing you to reduce time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees
• Enterprise Intelligence – Our first-of-its-kind knowledge management offering that delivers AlphaSense’s AI-powered search and summarization capabilities to customers’ internal organizational knowledge
• AlphaSense Assistant – A generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources

Together, these technologies accelerate and enhance your market research process, resulting in faster, better, and more confident decision-making.

Integration Capabilities

Challenges Solved:

• Siloed Content in Disparate Locations
• Limited Data Availability
• Limited Search Experience
• Bias in Data Collection

Even the best companies fall victim to silos. But forward-thinking organizations know to avoid this pitfall by leveraging the advanced collaborative tools found in modern market intelligence platforms.

AlphaSense works with the apps and tools you already use to help you be more productive with less effort. Connect with integrations to Box, Sharepoint, OneNote, or leverage our API suite to securely upload your proprietary content.

Our integration capabilities allow for even greater knowledge sharing with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal IP and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.

Lastly, AlphaSense offers content processing and content management. Content processing allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags and folder structures to better index and organize internal content.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

Challenges Solved:

• Reactive Research and Monitoring
• Too Time-Consuming and Manual

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help accelerate research workflows.  

• Customizable Dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to streamline your quantitative analysis by enabling you to export modeled time-series data on company financials.
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings
• Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

All together, our monitoring and automation tools help you be more proactive, rather than reactive, with your strategy because you can easily uncover patterns, forecast future market movements, and always stay in-the-know about relevant updates with our real-time alerts. This way, you increase the effectiveness, accuracy, and speed of your research and set yourself up with a competitive advantage. 

Enhance Your Market Research With AlphaSense

With AlphaSense’s AI-based search functionality, customizable alerts, intuitive user interface, and extensive library of premium content, it is truly the all-in-one market intelligence solution your business needs to succeed. We provide all the tools you need to avoid common market research pitfalls, ensuring that you stay on the leading edge and that your business keeps growing and succeeding.

Start your free trial of AlphaSense today.