As a product manager, you need to understand how market trends and the competitive landscape changes over time. Staying up-to-date helps you react faster to market changes, better inform your strategy, and get a healthy dose of inspiration. But it’s also quite confusing and time-consuming.
I’ve personally always had challenges following market dynamics on a day-to-day basis.
Luckily, I have great mentors who taught me a more practical and automated approach — using automated tools to do the heavy lifting for me. With these tools, staying up-to-date with market dynamics became clear and easy.
This article shares key parts of my market research process to streamline your process and keep you well informed.
Map areas of interest
To get started, clearly define areas of interest (ideally in the form of keywords). These help with setting up automation later on.
You can look at:
- Competitors
- Global keywords related to the product
- Related verticals
To clarify, imagine you want to build a retirement planning app. Some viable keywords could be:
- Competitors
- Empower — Retirement planner
- Betterment
- Stash
- Global keywords
- Retirement
- Retirement planning
- Passive income
- Related verticals
- Revolut (although not a direct competitor, it’s always worth observing big players on the market)
- Fintech (to track the industry as a whole)
Set automation
Most people don’t have enough time in the day to run routine market research. I see the value in it, but also understand that when calendars fill up, you have to prioritize your time and research can go out the window.
This just makes automation all the more important. With automation, market research becomes a low-effort activity you can run while drinking your morning coffee. Setting up proper alerts and newsletters(and actually catching up on those!) sets you apart from the majority of product folks.
Without further ado, let me share my favorite automated ways to track market dynamics.
Google Alerts
If you only want one automation tool, go with Google Alerts.
Simply go to www.google.com/alerts and you can set up keywords you want to track. The site sends daily or weekly summaries of news related to the keyword (I recommend weekly to avoid information overload):
Although Google Alerts might become overwhelming when tracking broad keywords (e.g., “fintech”), it’s a blessing when it comes to tracking news about competitors.
Website changes
It’s always beneficial to see changes to competitors’ websites, both in terms of the product itself and company pages
Luckily, you don’t have to do that manually. Websites such as visualping.io allow you to track websites for visual and text changes automatically. Similarly to Google Alerts, you just get a daily or weekly summary of all tracked websites.
However, some websites have advanced captcha protections that might block such tracking.
Store performance
If you work in the mobile app space, you can track the store performance of your competitors.
Tools like data.ai will let you know weekly things such as:
- Changes in the store rating
- New releases
- Rank changes
- ASO campaigns
In the case of data.ai, in addition to store performance monitoring, you also have access to various industry benchmarks.
VC investment news
Watching out for VC investment movements can give you valuable signals. If a particular category of products receives heavy funding, it’s a good predictor that these products will develop fast.
On the other hand, when VCs turn off the money tap for specific services, the services slow down over time.
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Consider subscribing to Pitchbook or Tech Funding News to see where the money goes.
Industry news
A weekly dose of related industry news always comes in handy.
Find one or two high-quality news sources for your industry (e.g., FinTech) and for areas of interest your product addresses (e.g., retirement saving).
Apart from industry-specific news, try TechCrunch for a dose of technology-related news.
Just don’t go overboard. Although it’s tempting to subscribe to dozens of newsletters and not to miss any news, it’s better to subscribe to one newsletter and read it than to have your inbox spammed with news you can’t catch up with.
Traffic analysis
Wouldn’t it be amazing to know how many visitors your competitors receive, where they are coming from, bounce rate, and overall engagement metrics?
Surprisingly… you can.
Tools like Similarweb allow you to track the high-level behavior of web users on any website.
Use it to understand how major trends change for both industries as a whole and specific competitors.
Stock market news
If some of your competitors are publicly traded, try tracking specialized stock-related news services, such as Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg. These platforms will give you a unique dose of news focused primarily on the business side of things.
Market intelligence agencies
Finally, if you have some capital to spend on market research, consider partnering with an external market intelligence agency, such as Mintel or Kompyte.
You can specify what type of research and information you need and the agency prepares a tailored report every month or so for you.
Last but not least, make sure to share what you learn within the company.
Aim for simplicity. There’s no need to create a dedicated Confluence page or worse, a PowerPoint deck for every insight you find. The market changes too fast to justify such a time investment.
Instead, you can create a dedicated Slack channel where everyone can share the most interesting insights:
It’s an effortless way to share and discuss news with colleagues without creating excessive documentation that starts collecting dust in a week.
Final thoughts
Staying up-to-date with market dynamics helps on all fronts. It allows you to
- Better understand your competitors
- Identify trends to ride
- Learn new insights
- Monitor customer preferences
Although there are many aspects of market research, such as tracking industry news, analyzing competitors, observing VCs and the stock market, and so on, you can delegate all of those activities to various automations. Automated alerts and newsletters can help you stay up-to-date with your most important areas of interest.
Don’t try to start tracking everything overnight. Start by tracking competitors via Google Alerts. Once you get used to reviewing them every week, add another automation.
Featured image source: IconScout