5 tools for assessing your online competitors

Site audience comparison tools provide marketers with industry and competitor intelligence to help inform decisions (e.g. new markets, new content strategies). Some of these tools also provide powerful segmentation capabilities. Typically, they do this either by aggregating Internet Service Provider data, panel data or a mixture of the two. Whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new market or wishing to understand what’s driving competitor growth, these tools can provide the relevant information to help inform key decisions. They’re often used to support business cases, helping to identify opportunities and threats in the competitor landscape. So if you are looking to map your competition, build a case for a new product line or more investment in your website, these tools can be extremely useful.

Key things to consider before purchasing and when using these tools:

…

How to select the right data management platform and audience profiling tools for your business

A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a place to store, sort and act upon multiple sources of online and offline data including search, social, display media, Email, CRM, Transactions (e.g. Point-of-sale). This includes first party data which the marketer collects on their site or through other customer interactions and on third party data pre-integrated into the platform, or data purchased from branded providers or lists. They also look to integrate desktop and mobile usage to provide a ‘single view of the prospect and customer’. As such they are also now commonly called Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Identity Management Platforms (IDMP).  Users of a DMP can import known (i.e. an email address) or unknown (e.g. a cookie) data and use this to define audiences or segments. The DMP will then find new customers (i.e. similar audiences)…

6 Great Content Curation Tools

They say that content is King. If that’s the case then curation has to be, at the very least, a Baron or something. Actually, scratch that. Content curation, when it’s done right, can be king too. One need only think of products and features like Reddit, Facebook Trending or Twitter Moments to see how important content curation is to the general public. Cutting through the noise of clickbait and subpar content marketing is extremely difficult, and that’s why effective content curation can be so valuable.

Short On Time? Curate!

If you have the time, creating your own content is a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. One need only look at the stats for proof of that: Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x as many leads Year on year growth of site traffic is almost 8x higher for content marketing…

Use these landing page creation and testing tools to optimise the conversion rates of your landing pages

Lead generation is a key goal of digital marketing in many sectors. By testing landing page layout, headlines and copy you can increase lead volume and thus potentially sales using cost-effective techniques. By hosting test pages on the servers of suppliers you should be able to bypass the need for agency or IT department involvement to get test up-and-running rapidly. The tools listed in this post will help you design and test pages which improve the conversion rate to lead. SmartInsights has no relationship with any of these tools, we just want to help readers looking to utilise landing page testing tools by pointing them to quality providers.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Ease of use of setting up tests Integration with CRM systems you use or plan to use …

Use these Social Media Campaign Tools to run more effective Social Media Campaigns

Social Media campaign tools give you flexible campaign and advertising tools for running campaigns on all the major social media platforms. They provide a quick and easy method for setting up customer engagement campaigns, from templates for quizzes, surveys, and sweepstakes to white label options with full CSS editing and iFrame functionality. These tools can focus on a number of campaigns goals (e.g. driving engagement or collecting leads) and have powerful social sharing features out the box but with custom options ensuring each campaign can be tailored accordingly.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Whilst these tools provide a quick and easy option for many brands, ultimately these tools act as a third party between you and the customer limiting your control of the customer…

Use these live chat tools to engage your users at the most critical stage of the buying process

As customer expectations rise and users demand instant responses to questions & complaints, live chat tools are growing rapidly both in usage and in capability. 60% of those in the 18-34 'millennial' age bracket reported in a study for Forrester research that they preferred to have their questions answered via live chat than via phone. 44% of that age group also reported that having the ability to ask questions via live chat was one of the most important features a site could offer. With the growing importance of live chat to the customer experience and thus your bottom line, you need to review what technology is available to deliver a great live chat experience, at a cost that is right for your business. That's why we've reviewed a wide range of live chat tools…

Up your slack game with these time-saving tools

What better way to boost marketing and sales productivity than using a productivity tool? Slack now has over 4 million users, and many marketing and sales tools have used that opportunity to reach more users by building integrations. The good news for marketers and sales personnel is that you can now get more work done without having to leave your Slack channels. This article summarises what you can do with these 10 great Slack integrations.

GrowthBot

I’m beginning with GrowthBot because it is a severely underestimated chat based marketing tool that can help you with content ideas, keyword research and monitoring your competition. Once you have integrated the tool, you simply have to say “Hello” to have it suggest a dozen or so questions that you can then use as queries. Some interesting questions are “What…

Marketing dashboards that can help you report on and analyze your marketing efforts

Like it or not, today's CMOs are married to metrics. They have to be. From closely tracking traffic to understanding which channels may be leaking potential leads, failure to make data-driven decisions continues to be the bane of many of today's marketers. As a result, global spending on data-based marketing continues to rise and is similarly expected to spike in 2017. As we delve deeper into an era of marketing dominating by metrics and big data, modern CMOs can't afford not to have some serious tools on deck to summarise the impact of their digital marketing. This rings especially true to understanding any combination of the following: Which marketing channels are worth scaling and are likewise providing a positive ROI Where leads are dropping off within your marketing funnels Which messages and campaigns are resonating with leads versus those…

Use these 'Voice of the Customer' Tools to gather qualitative data on your customers

Web analytics can provide the what, the when and the how, but struggle to deliver the why and the rationale which explains the numbers from your analytics tool. 'Voice of the Customer' tools can run continuously in the background, be focused on specific pages or be time-based, gathering detailed feedback on barriers to conversion, design issues, user confusion – all useful and actionable insight for marketers. These tools allow you to go beyond the quantitative insight of analytics tools and provide a deeper layer of site visitor feedback. Tools in this category are growing in popularity and include general website feedback, crowd sourced product opinions and exit survey functionality.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Be careful not to request too much data. Just like us, users are put off by surveys that are pages…

Use these Social Media Analysis Tools to better understand your customers

With the advent of digital marketing trends, social media analysis has become crucial to monitor the multitude of audience interactions towards the different products and services. Today, there are more than 500 tools in the market to measure a campaign’s performance on the different social media platforms. By 2020, the size of social media analysis tools in the market is expected to exceed 5 billion dollars. Before this happens, here are five of the best tools of today that will help you manage your social media channels more effectively:

1- Keyhole

Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics platform that tries to spare users from the hassle of manually switching from one tool to another. It takes note of the keywords users provide across several platforms, and then follows the…