Dave Wieneke, an online strategist who works in the Boston area, has managed web marketing for news and legal organizations and helped build several technology-focused start-ups. Along the way, he has developed his personal list of favorite tools for beating online competitors. Here are a few of the tools he says he always keeps “at the ready”:

Competitive benchmarking and measurement

• HubSpot can help you find low-hanging fruit for SEO improvement with its website grader, says Wieneke. “It’s seductive in its simplicity: Type in a few URLs and the automated tool ranks them on a 1-100 scale,” he says. “The tool provides an easy-to-print report on where things seem to be working and where improvements are needed. But be careful not to manage to this report — the trend line that matters most is increasing qualified traffic and converting it to business.”
• Alexa provides site info on a massive array of websites. “Though I’d maintain that their ‘tool bar’ collection method skews their data, you can get surprisingly useful insights from them,” he notes. “I recently looked at the design on two competing websites — one was reassuring, the other was hard-edged and jarring. Alexa data indicated that men and women consume the two sites quite differently.”
• Digging in by hand using the Google query “link:sitenamehere” returns to you the hundreds and even thousands of links to a website. “You can find out quickly how a competitor is link building and if they are earning quality links to gain reputation, as shown in Google’s webmaster tools,” Wieneke explains.

Tracking buzz on and off your site

• E-mail Data Source catalogues over 1 million new e-mails each month, and provides accounts of searching, or APIs for bringing that library in to your products. “Would you like to know when someone used your trademark in e-mail marketing? How about getting immediate notice when your competitors launch online campaigns?” Wieneke poses. It’s a paid service, and most marketers aren’t hip to it, he adds.
• Listen to Tweets. “Just over a year ago I wrote about using TweetScan to monitor brand reputations through alerts,” says Wieneke. “You can also use Twitter as a source of information for product management. “
• Don’t forget Google. Google Alerts and Google Blog Search are staples, says Wieneke. So are its webmaster tools, RSS reader, Google Analytics, and site-search products. “Yes, they all track buzz: There’s nothing better than knowing the exact keywords purchasers use to first find your site, or what natural phrases they use on your site to find what they really want,” he says.

Invest time and money in superior operations

• ExactTarget, which has become a real leader in e-mail marketing for organizations that want to go beyond batch and blast. “They’re my choice for sending highly personalized e-mails,” says Wieneke.
• Marketo provides “amazing lead monitoring and routing,” says Wieneke. “In my experience, it is a fantastically flexible, cost effective, and rapidly growing demand generation platform.”
• Salesforce is the data hub “that helps my systems work together, and focus the care clients receive,” says Wieneke. “In my opinion, all three are really best in class for doing what 80% of corporate clients need.”

Go to: UsefulArts

Posted May 26th, 2009 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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