Strategies: Research Sources

Guides selecting and organizing information sources for marketing research: content ideation, competitor monitoring, and industry tracking. Use this skill when planning where to gather signals for content, competitive intelligence, or market trends.

When invoking: On first use, if helpful, open with 1–2 sentences on what this skill covers and why it matters, then provide the main output. On subsequent use or when the user asks to skip, go directly to the main output.

Use Cases

Use case	Purpose
Content ideation	Topic ideas, trends, gaps for blog, newsletter, social
Competitor monitoring	Product updates, positioning, pricing, reviews
Industry tracking	Market shifts, funding, layoffs, regulatory changes

Source Categories

Category	Format	Use
News	Real-time, daily	Breaking news, announcements
Blogs	Company, analyst	Deep dives, product updates
Newsletters	Curated, weekly/daily	Trends, summaries; low effort
Events	Conferences, webinars	Industry pulse, networking
Data	Layoffs, market cap, funding	Quantitative signals
Community	Forums, Q&A	Real questions, pain points
Archives	Wayback, Internet Archive	Historical content, competitor changes

Selection criteria: Authority, freshness, coverage, language/locale. Prefer 10–15 high-quality sources over 50+ low-signal ones.

Example Sources (Generic)

Category	Examples
News	TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MIT Technology Review
Blogs	Google AI Blog, OpenAI Blog, company blogs
Newsletters	TLDR AI, Ben's Bites, The Batch (DeepLearning.AI)
Data	Layoffs.fyi, Crunchbase, Companies Market Cap
Archives	Internet Archive, Wayback Machine
Community	Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow; regional (e.g. Qiita for Japan)

Note: Add locale-specific sources via localization-strategy; avoid long URL lists.

By Use Case

Use case	Source types
Content ideation	News, blogs, newsletters, community (Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow)
Competitor monitoring	Competitor blogs, review sites, social, funding databases
Industry tracking	News, newsletters, events, layoff/funding data

Avoid: Long URL lists that go stale. Use category framework + a few examples; update periodically.

Integration with Skills

Skill	How research sources feed in
keyword-research	Newsletters, community for long-tail and question keywords
competitor-research	Competitor blogs, review platforms, funding data
content-marketing	News, blogs for topic ideas; events for timely content
content-strategy	Industry trends for pillar/cluster planning

Output Format

• Use case (ideation, competitor, industry)
• Category selection (news, blogs, newsletters, etc.)
• Source shortlist (5–15; name + purpose)
• Cadence (daily scan, weekly digest, event calendar)

Related Skills

• keyword-research: Keyword discovery; research sources inform topics
• competitor-research: Competitor analysis; sources for monitoring
• content-marketing: Content planning; sources for ideation
• content-strategy: Topic clusters; industry signals for pillars