Be precise and find exactly what you’re looking for with in-document and page review

Market Logic Team

By now, you may have noticed I’m a strong advocate for trusting in the power of findings when you want to answer business questions. Searching through reusable findings is a great way for your company to know what it knows from its gathered research across all relevant markets and target groups – answering your business question with speed and precision.

However, there are special cases that don’t fit into that standard mold. For example, you may recall reading a specific document that’s pertinent to your business question, but you just can’t remember the exact title. You can see the cover page perfectly in your mind, but the name just isn’t coming to you. We’ve all been there. Let’s take this particular scenario for example:

You’re working on compiling information on a topic you specialize in, or a colleague asks you to share some key slides on XYZ. While you start digging into these tasks, you remember a specific slide that had a picture of a girl with an ice cream cone and a caption with a great statement about your brand. [or imagine any slide that comes to your mind]. This slide would be perfect for your own presentation or to quickly share with your colleague – it has a strong message with impactful visualization. You rack your brain trying to think of more clues that might help your search. You vaguely remember it was done by your favorite market research agency.

But, when was this done again? What was the name of the document? How can you actually find this slide quickly without spending ages opening lots and lots of different documents in the hopes of finding that one specific slide? Because looking through your folders or your company’s folder structure most often results in the following: you type in a search term and depending on how technically advanced your search engine is, it either only shows hits on document titles or maybe it also searches through the documents’ text.

This means you end up with a long list of hits, but you aren’t any closer to finding that slide. So, you resort to opening each document, scrolling through everything, or using the PowerPoint search functionality. Depending on your luck and memory that day, you might find something quickly. However, listening to our clients, we know that often this isn’t the case. More commonly, we hear: “There are literally thousands and thousands of documents for the specific searches I do. I can never find what I am looking for; it’s never what I actually want to find. It’s so frustrating!”

To prevent any further hair pulling, clients at Market Logic adopt technology to get exactly what they want from their document search, quickly and easily.

When a Market Logic client searches for a document in their insights management system, they first type in their search term, but their results differ drastically from the example given above. Instead, this is what happens:

A thumbnail of the cover of the research report appears as a hit to your search query, refreshing your memory and helping to identify a document by sight alone.
When you click on a document of interest, the software first presents you with the relevant pages that actually include what you were looking for. You also get a preview of each slide with a highlight of your search term in the text, making it easier to scroll through the results without spending time on a) downloading the whole document and b) scrolling through slides you’re not interested in.
An option to bookmark any slide is available, which allows you to keep it in your personal collection for future searches.
And, while you’re at it, you can also continue working on your analysis in the software, compiling further relevant pages to…
… share with a colleague – because sharing truly is caring.

So, it’s your turn now: share your experiences with searching through documents.