Extract More Meaning with a Northern Light SinglePoint Strategic Research Portal
Jinfo Blog

By Sophie Alexander

Abstract

A Northern Light SinglePoint strategic research portal can aggregate a company's entire market research, both internal and external, and can be customised to deliver timely and accurate information to specific user groups. Sophie Alexander finds SinglePoint an easy-to-use portal containing a wealth of useful and focused research content for market and competitive intelligence staff, sales teams, marketing and purchasing managers, executives and more.

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Most companies only employ a few "expert" researchers but have lots of people who need to consume research as part of their job. By using Northern Light’s SinglePoint strategic research portals, researchers can ensure relevant and timely information reaches the right people via its customisable dashboards. These dashboards can be used to publish key research findings, links to important resources, graphs and charts or even videos.

Because most enterprise-wide search applications are optimised around simple search terms and are unable to use metadata or advanced query syntax, they usually produce the "lowest common denominator" search. Federated search is one solution often adopted by firms because then there’s no need to index a local repository on the enterprise network. But the indexing strategies and taxonomies vary depending on the content source and each search engine returns results based on their particular relevance ranking method.

Aggregating & Indexing Optimised for Business Research

Northern Light is different because it aggregates and indexes all the content using its search engine, MI Analyst™ which is optimised for business research. By using consistent indexing, taxonomy and text analytic strategies, it produces an integrated index that can behave the same way across all sources in terms of search syntax and relevance ranking.

By using meaning extraction, MI Analyst searches thousands of companies, industries and markets and hundreds of business issues like pricing, market share and financial results and identifies embedded concepts, allowing you to analyse the content and find relationships that imply meaning. The facets of MI Analyst differ by industry, giving the user more focused search results.

Internal & External Sources Included

Northern Light is also one of the few companies that operates on both sides of the firewall to aggregate internal and external market research, web news, industry authority blogs, white papers, social media, abstracts of life sciences conference proceedings and government databases.  

All the client has to do is identify or license the content they wish to include within the portal and Northern Light takes care of the rest, including configuration, content aggregation, indexing and search, text analytics, user management, document security and reporting. Some of the content that can be included within a research portal includes the client’s proprietary research, secondary research reports, Northern Light business news, industry authority blogs, white papers, social media as well as a client’s custom web search.

A Sophisticated Portal Offering High ROI

Promising a high return on investment, the portals can speed up and enhance the process of analysing markets, tracking competitors, forecasting technologies and developing new products, potentially saving millions of pounds per year. Because SinglePoint consolidates licensing, companies needn’t worry about duplicated report purchases. Nor do they have to manage lots of different internal websites for different audiences.

SinglePoint’s research portals would be of benefit to:

• Market and competitive intelligence staff
• Sales teams
• Product, marketing and purchasing managers
• Product developers
• IT practitioners
• Executive business leaders.

Because Northern Light is solely focused on providing strategic research portals, they’ve been able to gain a unique insight into what works and what doesn’t. As a result they have developed a sophisticated portal with unequalled content aggregation capability that spans a client’s entire research collection.

In times of continuing budget cuts and staff reductions, SinglePoint’s research portals don’t need more than a few staff to manage them. Consolidating all of a company’s research content into a single portal means that staff can spend a lot less time looking for the information and instead can focus on analysing it.

FreePint Subscribers can log in now to read more about Northern Light in our Q&A with Northern Light: a SinglePoint for a Company's Strategic Research Needs.

Full Review

The full FreePint Report: Product Review of Northern Light SinglePoint is now available to those with a FreePint Subscription.

Articles in series:

• Northern Light SinglePoint: Introduction, Value and FreePint's View
• Northern Light SinglePoint: Sources, Content & Coverage
• Northern Light SinglePoint: Search & Outputs
• Northern Light SinglePoint: Customer Support, Pricing & Contact Details
• Northern Light SinglePoint: Executive Summary

Editor's Note: Beyond Aggregation  

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation, which ran from October to November 2013. You can still register your interest to receive a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on News Content published in early December.

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