Module 2 - Other research

What is left to research once you know the client and the competition?

The last layer is the ongoing monitoring of their world, and I am going to share three tools that we use at s.media to do it. You have gone through your customer in detail, their business, their proposition and their offer, and you have gone through their competitors, so you have a real deep level of understanding about your customer and their universe. So how do you take it to the next level and gather that last bit of research?

How do you use Google news alerts?

Set up alerts on the client, and on the industry if the client itself is quiet. Go to Google and search for Google news alerts. This is great for monitoring what your clients are doing. If your clients are really big businesses and they are not engaged in a lot of PR activity, then you may not find alerts on here, but what you can do is use it to create industry alerts.

If your client is an architect, you can subscribe to every article that has the word architect in it. Or if your client is a brand, and let us take YouTube as an example, you can search YouTube and hit create alert, and now I am going to get alerts about everything to do with YouTube into my email. You can do this for anything, so let us take architect as an example. Anything coming up news related for architect, you can create an alert for.

Then you can refine your options so that you are receiving things in different languages and from different regions, and you can change the frequency. These can get a little bit annoying if you have them on a daily basis, because there is so much news channelled through Google, so instead of as it happens you might want it once a week.

What does the Facebook ads library show you?

It shows you exactly what a client or their competitors are actually running, including the full creative. If your client is doing advertising, or they have competitors who may be, checking the Facebook ads library is a really good indicator of what they are doing already and what the competitive marketplace is like.

Let us look in the UK. You can search by advertisers. Let us say we want to look at all the adverts to do with shoes, because they are one of my favourite subjects. What we see in the UK is lots of adverts appearing that are running active, all to do with shoes.

Then what is really interesting is to pick some. Oh, construction shoes. They are interesting. These look jazzy, do they not? Embassy London. Let us see the ad details, and what you can see here is the full advert. There are two different versions of this advert. It shows you where they currently are on Instagram and Facebook, and it shows you the full creative.

So if you are developing a pitch for a client, this is really insightful when you get to pitch stage, because you can show that you have got an understanding of the wider market.

What is Vidnetics for?

Vidnetics is an online platform you can use to find what videos are currently online. If I search, and here is something I made earlier, you can see all the video content and adverts that are on YouTube right now, and you can drill these down by various different fields.

So you can see what is going on. Here is an interesting one, "10 shoes every woman should own". Clearly this has had some advertising behind it, because there are so many viewers.

It is such an interesting tool because it gets you to understand what is out there at the moment.

When is Vidnetics most useful?

When you are advertising something potentially contentious and you are not sure whether it will work on YouTube. It is a good way to check whether it is already being done.

If you have got ads running in a specific industry or sector that you think may get blocked, dieting brands and healthcare brands for instance, they can sometimes be a little bit difficult on YouTube. Check on Vidnetics first and you get a sense of how others may have got around some of the rules and conditions that YouTube lay out.

So I guess that is it. I would use Google news alerts, I would use the Facebook ads library, and I would use Vidnetics to do that extra research.