Things You Can Learn from Social Media Monitoring

13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to…

When Search Marketing Tries to Tell You Something

The Key Point: Are You Listening?

Search marketing is the fastest, most affordable way to stay on top of market trends.  In order to make the most out of every search marketing dollar that you spend, we’ve outlined some important data you should review regularly to inform other, parallel marketing efforts and to insure optimal performance across all your marketing channels.

Data From PPC / Search Network Results…

To SEO:

Keywords that are Popular and Bring in the Most Relevant Traffic. This will help you know not only what keywords to target, but, can also save you money if you optimize your SEO for the highest traffic PPC keywords.

To PPC:

Negative Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. When clicks occur on search queries that are irrelevant you are throwing money out the window- so monitor the search queries that are…

Ethics in the Search Marketing World

…and How to Keep Your Nose Clean

The search marketing world creates interesting situations where ethical lines can get stretched quite a bit. For instance, in the search marketing world information is public. Yet unscrupulous actions can be taken anonymously — a scenario too tempting for many a desperate competitor. We run into many clients who have been unethically pursued by a competitor. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive policing capabilities out there, and complaints about suspected competition fraud are frequently ignored.  Still there are things you can do to protect yourself and you should never stoop to the level of an unethical competitor to retaliate — in the long run, there are always consequences for unethical behavior.

First, let’s look at some all-too-common non-ethical examples. These just don’t pass the red-face test:

Competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads.

First,…

Significant Shifts in Consumer Behavior Seen

Report by WPP Global Retail Practice Shows Recovery

Every business around the world, whether big or small, knows exactly what happened in the Great Recession: consumers became (understandably) spooked by the global collapse of once-solid financial institutions and stopped spending.

A new report by Yield Software investor WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, concludes that, despite widespread hardship over the last 18 months, the sky did not fall.  And better yet: consumers know it.  Playbook 2: The Sky Did Not Fall, the second report in a series developed by WPP’s global retail practice The Store, concludes “wallets are open.”

“But only a crack,” said David Roth, CEO of The Store for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia.  “Consumers are purchasing primarily to fill basic needs.  They’re tentative about the state of the economy and are ready to…

Sizing-up Your Competitor’s Mojo

Competitive Analysis for Web Marketing

There are a growing number of excellent tools and services – most of which are free for the basic versions – that can help you to determine how you stack up relative to your competition.  This includes everything from PPC campaign intelligence, to SEO, to social media attention.

Knowledge is power.  Take some time to understand where you stand relative to your competition; consider everything that you’ve learned; and then set out an action plan overcome any deficits you may discover.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you take action toward this end, including optimizing keyword lists and bids relative to what you’ve discovered your competition may be doing.

What follows is a list (which is by no means complete) of Web-based services that can help you understand the Web marketing mojo…