April 28, 2021 — Monitoring analyst research across multiple firms can be difficult because research firms don’t report on this in a standard way. Of course, you want to know who’s writing about topics that are relevant to, that impact, and that involve your company — along with when those reports will publish. But putting together a spreadsheet to track all that research can feel like a Herculean task — given ever-moving publishing dates, annual (and staggered) report updates, different file and reporting formats across various firms, and more. 

Our Firm Research Calendar simplifies the tracking process — making it easy to search for planned research by firm, research type, author(s), analyst coverage area and keyword, and see target publication dates too. 

In this episode of the Learning Series, our team of ARchitect experts explain how to search for upcoming research and even create a “project” against it — tracking various goals and milestones (such as providing documents, briefings and customer references for a relevant report). You can add activity and customizations to your projects, and report to see your progress. Follow along to learn more.

Finding Planned Research

Identifying upcoming, relevant analyst research can be crucial to securing inclusions, influencing the report’s direction and giving yourself the best chance to optimize your company’s positioning (if it’s an evaluation). Knowing who’s writing what helps you stay on top of what relationships to build too. 

You can use our Firm Research Calendar database to search and monitor future research from multiple analyst firms — accessing information about research you may have already been tracking, while unearthing other relevant planned research as well. The filters make it easy to search by analyst coverage area, authors, keywords, types of research and firms, and even select a date range. To do all this, first navigate to the Firm Research Calendar within ARchitect by hovering over Analysts, then Firms and then lastly selecting Firm Research Calendar. 

ARchitect software set-up with arrows pointing to "analysts" drop down menu, another black arrow pointing to the "firms" subcategory below, and another black arrow selecting "Firm Research Calendar" below.

Once you have found a piece of research that you’d like to follow or take action on, you can convert it into a “project” — enabling you to assign interactions and track progress toward achieving your goal (e.g., company or customer inclusion, positioning, etc.). By tracking the steps you’re taking and progress made, you can more easily see what is working. To convert a research item into a project, select the “Convert to Project” button in the upper right corner.

Project Shortcuts to Save You Time

While one common type of project is a research item, there are many ways to use projects for activities such as a product launch, analyst day and awareness campaigns. You can create a project in ARchitect for anything that’s process-oriented — tagging associated interactions so you can easily monitor your efforts, see if you’re on track and then determine whether your efforts were successful. 

Creating a project is easy because there are multiple places to do so. A simple way is to hover over projects in the top menu, select “Add New Project,” then fill in the fields and hit save. When adding interactions to projects, there are a few handy shortcuts to cut down your data entry. One way to add multiple interactions to a project is to use a bulk update. To do this, select the checkbox next to the interactions you would like to add in the interaction viewer, and hit “Apply a Bulk Update” at the bottom right. Here you can select, “Assign Project” and even quickly add a new one if needed.

List of projects in ARchitect with black arrow pointing to the "assign project" option at the bottom right of the screen, and another black arrow clicking the downwards pointing triangle

Another shortcut can save you time on entering project details to your interaction. You can take advantage of pre-filled interactions that pull the analysts, research item, date and analyst coverage areas into the interaction. To accomplish this, go to your project, then select the activity tab. There, you will see a button that says “+Prefilled Interaction.”

"Product Launch" page in ARchitect with black arrow pointing to "+ Prefilled Interactions" located under the "Activity" tab

Customizing Projects

Because all research firms are not alike in how they list upcoming research, building a standardized plan to influence analysts and their research can be difficult. Customizing your projects can simplify your workflows — enabling you to add custom fields that you want associated with a given project. Some common examples are goals, next steps and milestones. Custom fields on projects are very similar to custom fields on interactions. To create one, go to the site admin area and click “+ Add New Project Custom Field.” This can be a really useful customization to help you standardize the information associated with your AR projects across the organization.

ARchitect software set-up with black arrow pointing to the "site" drop-down menu, another black arrow pointing to the "site admin" subcategory below, and another black arrow selecting "Custom Fields"

Reporting on Projects

Projects are very beneficial in showing you the progress of your efforts and enabling you to report on them with regard to specific initiatives. ARchitect’s projects report can give you a bird’s eye view of the many aspects of a project, including counts of interactions, firms and analysts reached, articles published, and participants. This lets you clearly see how much you have put into each of your projects, from awareness campaigns to specific reports and more. You can greatly benefit from tracking these counts and also see what research you need to focus on. For example, if there are research deadlines coming up by the end of the quarter, and one report has 20 interactions associated with it and the other has two, you can prioritize your efforts accordingly. 

Final Thoughts

Being on top of research deadlines is crucial to an effective analyst relations program. Building out projects against analyst firms’ research calendars and your own initiatives can help you prioritize, monitor and report on your efforts — and ultimately drive greater visibility for your organization. If you have any questions about creating projects or need help with workflows, contact our support team at support@arinsights.com.