In Exercise 5 you should have already started identifying what industries fall under your career scope.

It’s now time to take your industry research to the next level.

Industry research can largely be divided into 2 categories.

Firstly, at the core of your research, there’s your competitor research. This is mainly useful for helping you to develop your product narrative, brand positioning, as well as helping you to improve your content marketing.

Secondly, there’s then your wider stakeholder research, which will mainly help you grow your professional network and build affiliate partnerships.

Industry research can be divided into 4 areas: 

1. Identifying your stakeholders
2. Understanding your stakeholders
3. Monitoring your stakeholders
4. And understanding your industry hot topics

In this lesson, we’ll be looking at all four in a bit more detail.

The first step to industry research is to identify who your stakeholders are.

Stakeholders are a specific group of people who in some way will help you grow your business or career.

So the first step is to become aware of the different groups of stakeholders, whose interests potentially align with yours.

Generally, the easiest way to identify your stakeholder groups is that they should largely match up alongside the key industries that you would have already identified in Exercise 5.

Additionally to those, there are your target customers, who are your primary stakeholder group.

So for example here at Rocket we have 5 stakeholder groups, these are:

Our primary stakeholder group, which is of course our target customers (we’ll be discussing these in more detail in the next lesson)

Our other stakeholder groups will then be influencers from the key industries we’ve already identified. Influencers would include journalists, bloggers, and vloggers, or interesting companies or individuals within those key industries.

So for example, stakeholder 2 for us are career consultants, education professionals, and philosophy groups (as this stakeholder group matches up with our first core value of living with purpose).

Stakeholder 3 for us are wellbeing consultants and charities (as this matches with our second core value of well-being)

Stakeholder 4 for us are recruitment professionals (as this matches up quite nicely with our third core value of professional development)

And finally, our fifth stakeholder group is business and marketing consultants (as this matches up with our fourth core value of solopreneurship).

Now that we’ve identified our stakeholder groups, the second step is to understand our relationship with those stakeholders.

We’ll be talking about your target customers in later lessons, but for now, let’s just focus on your industry stakeholders.

Now the first question you need to ask yourself when scanning an industry stakeholder is to what extent is their product or service similar to yours.

If they have an identical product or service to you then you can almost certainly rule them out, as they, therefore, become a direct competitor.

Direct competitors can be added to your competitor analysis in Exercise 7.

However, if their product or service is not similar to yours, or only partly similar to yours, then there may be an opportunity to create some sort of beneficial partnership with them.

If this is the case then you can think about categorising them into one of the following two groups:

1. Thought leaders
2. And affiliates

A thought leader is a stakeholder who shares interesting content that is relevant to your vision and mission, and their social media content may also very likely be receiving a high volume of engagement.

Identifying and monitoring thought leaders can be helpful for a number of reasons.

Firstly, they may be helpful in terms of helping you develop your product narrative.

Secondly, and probably most importantly, is that through repurposing some of their top-performing social media content, it can provide you with a goldmine of brilliant ideas to help you quickly grow your content marketing. (Something we’ll be coming back to later).

Thirdly, by commenting on their social media content it can help position yourself as an industry thought leader.

While fourthly, commenting on their content threads can also help increase your brand awareness to new and relevant audiences.

So, it’s certainly advisable that at some stage you begin following and closely monitoring your industry thought leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Affiliates are stakeholders who might be willing to share your content or product to their customers.

They won’t always post great content on their social channels, so you don’t have to always follow them closely on social media.

But quite often it can be useful to do so as it allows you to comment and engage with them on social media, and this can help warm up a potential relationship before emailing them with a formal proposal.

The main thing you want to be doing with potential affiliates as and when you come across them on social media is to add them to your CRM, with the intention of emailing them directly at a later date to enquire if they would be willing to establish an affiliate partnership.

We’ll be discussing how to go about developing affiliate marketing relationships in more detail in Lesson 20 when discussing your sales funnel.

The final thing worth mentioning here is that through this exercise of doing your industry and competitor research, is that it can also help signpost you towards who would be the best companies to work for within your industry, which we’ll be looking at in more detail in Lesson 15.

Using Exercise File 8 we’ve already set you up with a basic CRM system, in which each tab on the spreadsheet can be assigned to a different stakeholder group. 

CRM stands for Customer Relation Management. Managing a CRM is an important business skill to learn as all businesses will have one.

Essentially a CRM is your central hubspot where you’ll save your industry influencers for all of your future affiliate networking activity, whether your goal is to enquire about a potential job opportunity or to create an affiliate business partnership.

So hopefully by now you know what stakeholder groups you’re targeting, it’s now time to begin monitoring them on social media and adding them to your CRM.

The best way to go about this is by using Twitter and LinkedIn.

We’ll be speaking about LinkedIn later, but for now, let's just focus on Twitter. 

Twitter can be a really useful way of developing your industry research. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that Twitter and LinkedIn can potentially be the heartbeat of your industry research.


A worthwhile exercise to do at this point would be to set-up a series of different Twitter lists (that mirror your stakeholder groups from Exercise 5).

So for example our Twitter lists include:

• Career Consultants
• Wellbeing consultants
• Recruitment professionals
• And Business and marketing consultants

Once you set up your Twitter lists you’ll then want to add relevant influencers, companies and individuals into each list.


A good approach to this is to just follow your gut and begin by searching for whoever you think is a leading influencer within that industry that perfectly fits that core value.

Sometimes all you need to do is find one really relevant industry influencer, and then you can begin checking out all of the accounts that they follow, and that could then end up revealing a goldmine of useful stakeholders that you can begin adding into your relevant Twitter lists.

Once you start to build up a bit of momentum in terms of adding stakeholders to your

Twitter lists, and regularly monitoring their content, you’ll soon find yourself using Twitter organically as a really powerful tool to not only keep adding stakeholders into your Twitter lists and CRM, but you’ll soon get an idea of who the best thought leaders and potential affiliates are.

We recommend getting in the habit of spending a little bit of time every day on monitoring Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, while also keeping your CRM and Content Marketing Planner open in separate tabs at the same time, so that you can quickly save potential affiliates into your CRM, and content ideas into your Content Marketing Planner while you browse through your social media feeds.

This exercise can be hugely challenging so don’t stress out about it too much at the beginning. It will take you a bit of time, as well as trial and error, to really get a grasp of this and find a routine that works best for you.


This is more of a marketing activity that you will be focusing on a lot more after you have produced your product.

However doing a competitor analysis can be a great way of developing your product narrative so that’s why we think it’s important to mention it at this stage.

The final part of industry research is to understand your hot topics and trends.

Hot topics are topics that your target customers are passionate about. So it’s important to become aware of them and where and how exactly they fit into your product and marketing narrative.

Trends are topics that are currently trending. These tend to change on a day to day basis, so it can be difficult keeping your finger on the pulse of them.

Being aware of hot topics and trends is an important tactic to helping supercharge your content marketing.

Your content marketing should largely focus on positioning yourself as an expert on your brand's hot topics, but when one of your hot topics is also trending then you’ve hit the jackpot and you should be going all out within your marketing activity to comment and raise awareness while the iron is hot.

(In Exercise 32 we’ll be discussing how you can go about monitoring for trends.)

But for now, let’s focus on your hot topics.

You should be able to use your customer research to help you identify your hot topics. But it’s likely your awareness and understanding of hot topics will improve with the more industry research that you do.

Once you’ve identified a hot topic that you want to create content around you can then add it to Exercise File 10.

We suggest the best way of going about understanding your hot topics is by firstly splitting Exercise File 10 into two columns.

In column A you can list the key topics from your product narrative. In column B you can then list your hot topics.

You should then be able to easily spot where and how those hot topics fit within your product narrative.

You can then add those hot topics into column A of your Content Marketing Planner and starting saving relevant content alongside them.

The benefit of this exercise is that when you do get round to commenting on a hot topic on social media you’ll now instantly be able to understand how that hot topic fits within your product narrative.

Ensuring that the tone of your social media responses remain consistent and aligned with the tone of your product narrative.