BK 301-02: Marketing Research

It's essential to check a company's website for:

• Official documents like press releases & annual reports for information on products/services, insight into corporate philosophy and company structural health/goals.

• Job listings, which provide information about characteristics a company may be looking for in an employee as well as required skills for specific positions.

You should also analyze competitor company websites for comparison/contrast.

Take a look at some of these great website evaluation tips!

Look for company information submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, including Form 990.

Finding what you need on comprehensive websites can be time-consuming. Look for sitemap to locate specific materials, or use this handy trick:

• Open Google search bar
• Type in search term(s)
• Type in "site" + ":" [colon symbol] followed by the URL.

This technique will yield search results for your keyword(s) only within the website URL.

Narrowing your results:

You can search by specific domains. For example, if you only want government jobs sites, you can search "jobs" +  "site:.gov" .

You can also also search for specific file types. For example, to search for a PDF document on jobs, search "jobs" + filetype:PDF.

Because private companies may not release much information to the public and the analysis/reports that exist for large, public companies like Target or Volkswagen do not exist, you may have to think "outside the box" to locate useful information. Here are some suggestions:

• Reach out to the company - often their public relations or human resources dept. might be helpful. Are they doing a lot of hiring? Can they share promotional information with you? The information will be very favorable to the company, of course, but it does tell you how the company sees itself.
• Search news headlines - what kind of information has the company used to promote itself? Has a key executive within the company given an interview? Have they been recruited from another company? How long has the company been in operation? Has there been any research by journalists that is publicly available? 
• Zoom out and research the general industry/market that the company competes within. For example, if your company operates coffee shops only within a particular state, research business trends within that state, or research the overall trends within the industry. Labor and market statistics and trends published by state and federal government can be invaluable (see websites page for more ideas).
• Contact the department of business development or labor within the state where the business is located (see Corporate Registration and Internal Revenue Service links above). There may be information on how the company filed to operate within that state - is it a partnership? A limited liability company? What kind of paperwork/documentation did it have to submit to establish itself within the state?

A private company does not offer or trade its company stock to the general public on the stock market exchanges; instead, the company's stock is offered, owned and traded or exchanged privately. Privately held companies generally have fewer or less comprehensive reporting and transparency requirements than publicly traded companies.

Source: Library of Congress Research Guide - Private Companies