The technology industry is evolving at a rapid clip as new innovations, trends, and market players emerge every day. For tech companies wanting to stay competitive in the current economic climate, comprehensive and efficient market research is imperative. This enables companies to understand the market and competitive landscape, stay informed on competitors’ moves, and track rapidly evolving consumer preferences.
For investors and venture capitalists who are interested in the technology space, market research is just as critical. It allows them to pinpoint emerging opportunities and gain valuable insights on market share, segmentation, and the total addressable market (TAM).
The technology space is fast-paced and slow manual market research processes may hinder your ability to make timely investment decisions. That’s why so many leading organizations rely on artificial intelligence (AI)-based market research tools that help them separate the signal from the noise and extract the most meaningful insights from vast quantities of data.
AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by over 4,000 enterprise clients, including 88% of the S&P 100 and 80% of the world’s top investment firms. Users rely on AlphaSense for aggregated market research (spanning over 10,000 premium, proprietary, public, and private content sources) and smart AI search technology that increases research comprehensiveness and confidence.
Whether you are a corporate business professional looking to find new growth opportunities in the tech space or improve your company’s marketing strategy, or you are a venture capitalist scoping out potential investments in the tech space, a tool like AlphaSense is a must-have to ensure you are getting a complete view of the market without wasting unnecessary resources on low-yield tasks. With AlphaSense’s advanced AI technology, you can eliminate the manual parts of your research process, leaving more time and resources for strategic decision-making.
Below, we discuss the components of effective tech market research and how conducting market research on the AlphaSense platform provides you with the competitive edge.
Components of Effective Tech Market Research
Primary Research
Primary research, or research that a company conducts itself through qualitative methods, can provide valuable insights about your target audience. Primary research is often the first step in tech market research before diving into robust reports, company data, and industry insights. This method of data collection (when done effectively) helps you understand your customers’ needs and pain points, enabling you to improve their experience and your marketing efforts.
Primary research is also valuable when testing out the feasibility of a new product or when developing a new feature. Examples of primary research include online surveys or questionnaires completed by your target market, focus groups, in-person interviews, observational studies, and user testing. While you have more control with this type of research, it is significantly more time-consuming, vulnerable to bias, and limited in scope than secondary research.
However, a notable exception is expert calls—in-depth interviews conducted by analysts with industry experts. Because expert calls are conducted by experienced buy-side analysts, companies can leverage them for unbiased primary research. This type of qualitative research can enhance your market research by complementing numbers-focused quantitative research.
Secondary Research
Secondary research has a much larger scope than primary research and enables a much more well-rounded, thorough understanding of the industry, its key players, and emerging market trends.
Companies use it to get a full view of the market landscape and their competitors, and investors rely on it to scope market landscapes for high-growth opportunities in emerging sectors.
Secondary research typically includes more data-driven resources such as company documents, equity research, news, trade publications, industry reports, and more. AlphaSense’s comprehensive content library draws from over 10,000+ high-quality content sources and provides current coverage of both public and private companies of all sizes.
Being the first to know of potential industry disruptors is crucial in the fast-moving tech space. The AlphaSense platform allows you to find emerging high-potential companies instantly and then easily gather data points on them from across the various content sets housed on the platform—an all-in-one capability not found in many other market intelligence platforms.
The Four Perspectives
AlphaSense enables users to access a curated collection of content sources, specifically brought together with one purpose: helping professionals make better business decisions. AlphaSense combines content from the four essential market perspectives in one powerful all-in-one market intelligence platform.
These are the four perspectives that are necessary for getting a complete picture of a market, industry, company, watchlist, or trend:
- Company – includes all company documents such as 10Qs, earnings calls, press releases, and more
- Analyst – includes equity research from Wall Street’s top analysts covering the technology industry
- Expert – includes calls with industry experts like former executives, customers, competitors, and partners who are no more than two years out of the industry
- Journalist – includes all news, trade journals, and regulatory information relevant to the tech industry
Relying on these four perspectives in tandem ensures a more well-rounded understanding of the industry at any given moment and eliminates the potential for research blind spots.
Two of the most valuable content sets, for both tech strategists and investors, are proprietary to the AlphaSense platform and offer access to insights you can’t find anywhere else:
Wall Street Insights®
Wall Street Insights® is a collection of leading equity research from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, covering global industries, sector themes, and companies. Equity research is crucial in market research, not least of all because it can be so challenging to access.
Broker research reports have long been used by investors to come up with lucrative investment ideas and make smarter investment decisions. Now, forward-thinking corporations are also seeing the value of broker research for quickly getting smart on market landscapes and understanding analysts’ expectations on market trends, industries, and peer performance.
With AlphaSense, you get instant access to multiple leading firms’ equity research, coupled with advanced AI search technology that helps you quickly identify key insights from these reports. Wall Street Insights® allows you to uncover new opportunities and always stay one step ahead of your competitors.
Expert Insights
AlphaSense Expert Insights includes an expert transcript library that provides access to tens of thousands of interviews with competitors, industry experts, customers, and current and former executives. Expert Insights also includes Expert Call Services, allowing you to conduct your own one-on-one expert calls for less.
Because of the fast-changing nature of the technology industry, all insights must be current to be relevant. That’s why all of the interviews housed on the platform are with experts less than two years out of the industry. AlphaSense’s Expert Insights library also has a number of compliance safeguards to eliminate the risk of exposure to confidential or material non-public information (MNPI).
In the highly competitive and fast-moving tech industry, having access to exclusive insights coming straight from industry experts will set you apart from your competition and pave the way for your next successful investment opportunity. Expert calls are one of the best ways to gain deep insight into niche spaces within the tech space and hear commentary on larger market-impacting trends.
Speed Up Your Time to Insight With Artificial Intelligence
While AI is not strictly necessary for conducting market research, it is the secret weapon behind every organization, investment firm, and venture capital company that is outpacing the competition. AI not only dramatically speeds up the research process, enabling you to spend more time on analysis and strategy, but it also separates the signals from the noise.
In a world of continuous information overload, having a tool that can scrawl across a vast universe of content and filter out the most relevant insights is critical for strategic decision-making. Here is how the AlphaSense platform enhances your research process with proprietary AI features:
Semantic Search
AlphaSense’s smart AI search technology recognizes the intent of your search and surfaces key insights without you having to perform multiple manual searches or spend 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. You don’t need to perform multiple searches or risk missing any critical information because the platform ensures you get all the relevant search results—without any of the excess noise or extraneous effort.
Sentiment Analysis
Our sentiment analysis technology utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to uncover market perceptions about any given topic. Furthermore, 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 multiple earnings call transcripts.
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 over 10 years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time.
Our suite of tools currently includes:
- Smart Summaries – this feature transforms and improves your search experience on our platform, generating key insights from earnings calls, expert calls, and broker research for faster analysis
- Enterprise Intelligence – a first-of-its-kind 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.
Tech Market Research Use Cases In AlphaSense
Competitive Intelligence
With AlphaSense, you can always be the first to know about any competitor updates with our company recognition and Search Summaries features.
Let’s say you want to identify growth investments or spending priorities for a competitor, key account, or investment target. Particularly during an economic downturn, understanding where your competitors, clients, or investments are channeling their money will give you important insights into how they are performing.
The following are pre-programmed searches that you can use within the AlphaSense platform to gain insights for your competitive analysis:
- Cost-Cutting Initiatives – Identify where companies are cutting costs, deprioritizing certain business segments, and reallocating capital expenditures.
- Investment Allocation Strategies – Identify which business segments or growth initiatives a company is increasing investment in, and where they are allocating capital amid budget reallocations.
- Project and Product Expenditures – Identify specific projects or products that the company is allocating budget and capital to.
- Segment Investments – Identify which companies are increasing their spend on products and services you sell, and which industries are likely to continue investing in your product category.
Additionally, you can use AlphaSense’s company tearsheets to compile company profiles, which include segmented revenue, acquisitions/investments, strategy, partners, earnings calls, and industry context from broker reports and expert calls. You can also see the average sentiment of a company at a glance and how that has evolved over time, as well as the topics this company is discussing most.
These insights enable you to develop recommendations on growth opportunities, benchmark against competitors, find partners and vendors, generate ideas for new product development, and identify competitive risks.
Deal Strategy
Let’s say you need to perform due diligence on some companies to scope out M&A viability. AlphaSense helps you quickly uncover the TAM, identify new targets, get information on comps, and conduct synergy analysis.
You can use AlphaSense’s NLP-based feature theme extraction to find financial metrics that are not found within standard 10-Ks or 10-Qs, as well as parse through alternative information sources for companies not covered or that are part of an emerging industry. In the technology space, this feature can be critical, as new companies frequently emerge, and it is nearly impossible to find all the right information without a platform like AlphaSense. The AlphaSense platform also allows you to set up watchlists and real-time alerts to ensure you never miss a critical update about the companies you are interested in.
When searching for any private companies within the platform, you can instantly access funding round information, including amount, announcement date, lead investors, and post-money valuation, without digging through multiple sources. Additionally, the company’s acquisition history, as well as peer comparison charts, are automatically generated and exportable to Excel.
Market Landscaping
You can create a customizable dashboard in the AlphaSense platform to monitor companies or topics of relevance to you in real time. You can also set real-time alerts so that you never miss an important update from or about a specific company, topic, or industry.
Let’s say you are interested in a particular subsector in the tech industry, such as electric vehicles, AI, or SaaS. You can search those specific topics in the platform and instantly see an overview of how the keywords trend over time.
You can also use specific searches, like the preset ones listed below, to perform an in-depth competitive landscape analysis and scope out market opportunities in specific subsectors:
- Media, Entertainment, and Advertising:
- Funding and IPOs:
- Telecom:
- Digital Disruptions:
- Other:
Ad-hoc Industry Analysis
If you need to know the specifics about certain verticals within the tech space, or need to understand how the technology industry impacts other industries, the AlphaSense platform can help you answer the following questions:
- What industries are impacted by a specific technology (i.e. how the semiconductor industry is impacted by generative AI, and vice versa)?
- What industries function together, or are part of the same supply chain (i.e. car engines and batteries are separate sectors but are both part of Tesla’s supply chain)?
- What is the TAM or market size within the industry segment?
You can also use premade searches to uncover the latest trends in your specific sector:
Earnings Prep and Analysis
Earnings season is critical for anyone making investment decisions, creating an investment strategy, or looking to gain intel on the competitive landscape to inform the following quarter’s business decisions.
Because companies publish such a wide breadth of information during earnings season, it’s important to have systems in place that ensure you can efficiently parse through and analyze critical information.
AlphaSense is instrumental in developing and implementing these systems. Our vast content universe contains every piece of data pertinent to earnings preparation, and our AI-search technology enables you to get the insights your peers don’t have access to and establish a single source of truth.
Learn how AlphaSense helps clients collect, synthesize, and contextualize earnings data—swiftly and without the hassle—with this list of essential tools in the platform.
Additionally, AlphaSense’s sentiment analysis feature takes your earnings analysis to the next level and allows you to answer the following questions:
- What are consumers, analysts, and management teams saying about your peers?
- What is the sentiment toward your own company?
- What is the sentiment of your peers on earnings calls?
- Are your peers speaking positively or negatively about key topics?
- How has sentiment on a particular topic shifted over time?
Company sentiments conveyed in earnings calls often translate to shifts in the market, as sentiment analysis unearths deeper insights that go far beyond the surface of what a company is saying at face value.
Comparing changes in sentiment score from prior earnings call transcripts can also help you piece together a larger narrative, allowing you to spot compromises in continuity that could indicate red flags.
Experience the AlphaSense Difference
AlphaSense is the must-have tool for anyone conducting market research in the technology space. Our vast content library, combined with proprietary AI search technology, streamlines, enhances, and speeds up research workflows—without ever sacrificing confidence or comprehensiveness.
Level up your research processes and gain your competitive advantage with AlphaSense. Start your free trial today.
Content Marketing Specialist
Fueled by empathy-driven storytelling and good coffee, Nicole is a content marketing specialist at AlphaSense. Previously, she has managed her own website/blog and has written guest posts for various other publications.
Read all posts written by Nicole Sheynin
