37 Marketing Tools to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Following on from my last blog, here are the next 6 recommended marketing tools to optimise your online presence (No's 8 - 13)

  
  Keyword Monitoring Tools

Related to ad monitoring tools (see previous blog) there are those that help you check out the keywords your competitors are targeting in their search marketing campaigns. Do this, and you can improve your own ROI by figuring out what's working for them. Here's a selection:

8. iSpionage looks at how your competitors are advertising with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo search marketing tools. You can view ads and track spending. It also includes SEO competitive research and a social monitoring tool for Twitter and Facebook.

9. KeywordSpy helps with competitive keyword discovery. You can find out how much your competitors are spending on AdWords and discover which combinations of keywords and advertising copy are working for them.

10. Keyword Competitor helps you spy on organic and paid keywords, ads, and landing pages for your competitors, with daily updates in rankings. The site also has tools for monitoring competitors and working with affiliate marketing.

11. SEMrush lets you monitor competitors' organic keyword positions, find relevant long tail keywords, see your competitors' PPC ads, and more. It also includes SEO tools. There's a wealth of data available from the free search bar on the homepage, though you will have to upgrade ($69.95 per month) for more queries and results.

12. SpyFu lets you see up to six years of data on your competitors' keywords, ranking, and ads helping you with SEO and PPC advertising. There's a limited free tool, though you have to subscribe for access to advanced competitive intelligence.

13. The Search Monitor looks at paid and organic search and even how you look against your competition in comparison-shopping engines. This multifunctional tool also monitors affiliates and trademarks as well as who's discussing your brand. It starts at $299 per month.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com

37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

I've always liked the idea of being a spy, complete with gadgets, fast cars, and an attractive significant other. It would be a great way to get secret information.

Well, it may be too late for me to join the Secret Service, but I can indulge in a bit of undercover information gathering – and you can, too – by taking a sneak peek at competitors.

We're not talking industrial espionage, but there are plenty of good reasons to see what competitors are doing. You can:

• Get inspiration for new ways to connect with customers and thereby improve customer retention.
• Find out if competitors are doing anything better than you and how you can match it.
• Look under the hood of their search and marketing optimization strategy and see what you can legally steal.
• Improve your own plans to beat the competition based on data rather than assumptions.

There are dozens of marketing tools that you're probably already using to monitor your own performance. These can be used to get competitive intelligence. Let's assume you already know who the competition is. All you have to do is monitor these different areas.

Here are the first 7 Marketing Tools;

Ad Monitoring Tools

Do you want to know where your competitors are advertising so you can do the same? Would you like to know which keywords they are targeting? If you want to troubleshoot your PPC and display ads, this set of tools will help you:

1. Adbeat is an enterprise tool that lets you see all of the ads that particular advertisers are using, split test their ad copy to help you with strategy, and find competitors you didn't even know about. The introductory package starts at $99 per month, though that monitors only Google ads. There's a 30-day free trial.

2. AdGooroo is a multifunctional tool that includes a Display Insight feature. The basic service lets you monitor ads for up to ten competitors, ranked by page views. Its Industry Insight allows you to figure out ad placements, too. Pricing is not stated.

3. AdGooroo also has an SEM Insight tool that incorporates keyword research, competitive intelligence, PPC and SEO tools, and traffic data. Pricing is not stated.

4. MixRank allows you to see the mix of ads that companies are using. You can see a snapshot of this data (without registering) that covers display ads, text ads, advertisers, and demographics, though you will have to create an account for the full report.

5. Moat provides a free ad search tool that allows you to key in your competitors' brand names and see what ads they have shown recently. You can see the size and some of the places the ads have been seen recently, giving you a good guide for where to place your own advertising.

6. SocialAdNinja has a database of 400,000 social PPC ads. It's a great tool for monitoring global Facebook advertising. It includes fine-grained search features so you can identify ads targeting your key demographic and find out which links they point to. There's a single membership level at $147 per month.

7. WhatRunsWhere helps you monitor competitors to figure out their advertising strategy and where they are placing ads. As a bonus, it can help with advertising research and split testing, finding new sources of traffic, and ad buying.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com

Online Marketing Articles Worth Reading #6

There are five key areas to consider as you’re marketing your business online, and I’ve selected from recent marketing articles to share the best one in each category with you:

1. Blogging: Like any other activity, blogging is a skill that needs to be continuously practiced and improved. Rather than just writing randomly and hoping that you’ll get you the results you want, it helps to follow a process that focuses you on your reader, the benefits to the reader, and lastly, optimizing for search engines. Copyblogger’s post about 6 simple steps to writing seductive web copy is a great one to get you started.
2. Content Marketing: How can a small business get started with content marketing? It can be overwhelming at first, but there are a few simple steps that you can take to get started: understand your customers, repackage your existing content, interview customers, distribute your content strategically, and track your blog metrics. These steps are explained in the Business2Community post about how to write a bare-bones content strategy for small businesses.
3. Search Engine Optimization: If you read only one article about SEO this week, this should be it. What are the latest trends in SEO? What type of content will get you the best results? How does Google authorship affect your search results? All of these questions and more are answered in this great post at Search Engine Journal about the top 10 SEO industry trends for 2013 and 2014. 
   
4. Social Media: Are you using LinkedIn to generate leads for your business? While LinkedIn is a great network for all professionals, it is especially important for those involved in B2b services. If you’ve set up your profile but aren’t sure what to do to make the most of LinkedIn, this post from Small Biz Trends shares five steps that lead to LinkedIn lead generation that you can use.
5. Websites: Think for a moment about what would happen if your website was hacked. Pretty horrible, right? Security for your website is a priority that you cannot ignore. Fortunately, securing your website can be done quite easily. Social Media Examiner shares 5 steps to ensure that your WordPress website is secure.

Source; online-marketing-articles-worth-reading

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