Listening and Responding to the Marketplace

Chapter six of Katie Paine's Measure What Matters focuses on using numbers to get closer to customers. She mainly talks about listening, learning and responding to the marketplace. In the marketplace, there are five things to do.

The first is setting up and refining search terms. You should set up Google Alerts to search keywords your company uses. Next, you need to monitor the results to determine if your keywords are effective. If the keywords are not helping, then they need to be changed or refined. A phrase can be placed in quotes to help refine the search. In addition to your company, alerts should also be set up for competitors' names and brands.

The next step is reviewing and tracking results. A majority of results are irrelevant or not interesting to you. These results have to be discarded. Paine recommends creating an Excel spreadsheet to track items. The date the item appeared, source, author and subject should be included in this spreadsheet.

Once that is done, you have to check which outlets matter. After a month, there will be a list of channels and outlets that mention your company, products or market. A way to refine your list is determining the ratio of comments to posts and rank them from highest to lowest. You can assume that posts with the greatest amount of comments have a greater interest and influence to more people. Other things to pay attention to are channels, outlets and writers who get the most comments, as they are normally more influential.

The last two steps are closely related. The fourth step is figuring out what the market things of you and your competition. You have to learn what issues have the most concern and your position. Finally, you have to see how you are positioned in the marketplace against your competition and use that knowledge to gain an advantage. When you learn your competition's strengths, you can work to improve your products. Likewise, when you know the competition's weaknesses, you can determine the best way to gain an advantage. This exercise provides you with great information. However, the most valuable information is what the market likes best and least about your competition.

I think this exercise is important for companies to do. The exercise can show companies how effective their search terms are, as well as the keywords of their competitors. Companies can learn the most influential outlets and pay attention to them. Also, they can learn how to get a step up on their competition.