Digital marketing is becoming more complex by the day, and marketers need all the tools they can lay their hands on to maintain a competitive advantage.
Digital marketers frequently mine search data to create tailored campaigns. Analytics are the cornerstone of these processes. Without the ability to slice and dice data, marketers will be flying blind.
Sophisticated marketing analysis tools have made marketers’ lives easier these days. Here are three types of digital marketers who see a whole lot of value from these types of tools.
SEO and performance marketers
According to HubSpot, 64% of marketers actively invest time to improve their SEO. Organic traffic doesn’t cost anything and pays the highest dividends over the long term. Every SEO specialist is familiar with mining keyword research tools to discover high-performing keywords and potentially profitable new keywords.
Paying attention to the competition is extremely helpful when optimizing SEO. Your content will only surface at the top of a keyword’s search results if it outranks everyone else for that keyword. In today’s competitive landscape, customer patterns change quickly, and new keywords emerge quickly.
It’s impossible to keep track of the entire landscape of keywords users employ. This is why keeping an eye on your competitors’ top-performing keywords is essential. Best of all, intelligence tools these days help marketers prioritize keywords based on any combination of metrics.
For instance, marketers can prioritize keywords based on search volume, actual click rates, and paid versus organic clicks. There’s no end to the way these data can be sliced and diced.
Performance marketers often keep a close eye on the SEO performance of their keywords, since they use data to customize messaging. For instance, they can view the top-performing ads in their industry and tailor new ads accordingly. You can even benchmark performance to industry standards to measure effectiveness.
These features make it easy for marketers to react when they spot potential weaknesses in their campaigns. Backed by powerful metrics, they can change their messaging or keyword strategy and immediately impact their audience.
Marketers measure their performance against both industry standard and competitor benchmarks. This gives them a well-rounded look at their campaigns’ performance and helps them connect with their audiences better.
Direct media buyers
Media buyers face tough decisions these days, thanks to the variety of channels they can bid on. Optimizing budgets can be tough, since it can be hard to source relevant data for a platform. For instance, a publication or ad network that was relevant a few months ago might have experienced significant changes that make them irrelevant for the marketer’s product.
Competitive analytics tools alert media buyers to top-performing competitor ads and the platforms on which they’re being displayed. They can view their competitors’ search, display, video, and product listing ads during any period.
Not only does this give you an edge by figuring out what the ads look like, but it also alerts you to changing trends in the competition’s strategy.
Performance statistics can help alert you to the best performing networks, and thus, optimizing media budgets is simple. As with SEO, media buyers can unearth new networks that might be potentially more profitable than existing ones.
As a result, companies can count on never being a step behind the competition and can always convey their product’s advantages to their audience. Collaboration with media planning departments is also simplified, since buyers can cite data as evidence for changing strategy and proposing alternative venues.
Affiliate marketers
Word of mouth marketing is the most powerful way to boost brand presence. In the digital world, affiliate marketing comes closest to replicating it. The quality of a brand’s affiliates speaks volumes about its product, brand vision, and customer orientation.
Like with SEO and ad networks, affiliates can be tough to manage over time. An affiliate’s focus might shift, which makes the company’s product a poor fit. In addition, evaluating new affiliates or partners can be tough, since metrics can be manipulated.
Market research tools help affiliate marketers understand where their potential partners’ traffic comes from and how engaged that traffic is. For instance, if a potential partner is spoofing huge traffic numbers by using bots, or boosting engagement through fake likes and comments, an analysis tool will instantly spot what’s going on.
Evaluating affiliate and brand performance is also simple since marketers can view their traffic share and income earned by source – and choose which relationships they’d like to preserve moving forward. Dissecting the change in an affiliate partner’s audience over time is also simple, thanks to the deep analytical abilities that platforms provide marketers.
The result is a cohesive affiliate strategy that is simple to monitor and optimize.
Better analytics, better results
Competitive analysis is a fundamental part of today’s digital marketing landscape. Thanks to sophisticated market intelligence tools, marketers can dig deep into their competitor’s activities, benchmark their performance, and design better campaigns.
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3 types of marketers who benefit most from competitive analytics
