6 Competitive Intelligence Tools from 6 Experts Biznology Webinar with Rob Petersen

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Chris Abraham, one of the bloggers at Biznology. I'm founder and principal consultant of Garrus Digital, an agency devoted to online brand promotion and protection through influencer outreach and engagement. I focus on search engine optimization, online reputation management, blogger outreach and engagement, and Internet Crisis Response. Today we'll be hearing from Rob Peterson, who will present 6 competitive intelligence tools from 6 experts. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. Gagalamp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try Gagalamp for free today. Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. And MENG, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job; we're about staying current to grow in our careers. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and will email you the link later this week. During our presentation, you can go to GoToWebinar and ask me and Peter— sorry— and Rob a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your control. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I will select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Rob. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not ready— if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is. So let's introduce today's speaker. Rob Peterson is president of BarnRaisers, a digital marketing solutions company that uses social media, the power of community, and the proven principles of relationship marketing to build brands. He's also on the MBA faculty of Rutgers University, where he teaches courses in web analytics, SEO, and social media measurements and ROI. Rob has been recognized by the American Marketing Association for building billion-dollar businesses multiple times. So if you've ever struggled with how to use competitive intelligence for your business, This is the webinar for you. Rob, take it away.

Thanks, Chris, and welcome everybody to this webinar on competitive intelligence and tools that you can use to monitor your competition better. I'm going to start today's webinar with a couple of definitions of competitive intelligence, and this first definition comes from the year 5000 BC from Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist, philosopher in general who was the writer of The Art of War. And he has a very good definition of competitive intelligence which is current even today, which is know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight 100 battles without disaster. A very good and timeless definition of why we or businesses or countries do business or competitive intelligence. But that definition's been transformed over the course of a couple of centuries, And now, really, this definition, which is kind of a contemporary compilation of what exists in Wikipedia and from other sources, is really how we define competitive intelligence today. It's a systematic process that— and where we gather, analyze, and disseminate information with the idea of helping companies achieve their goals. So the important thing to take away in how this definition's been evolved is that competitive intelligence today is a process, and it's one where a company needs to actually make sure that they have the resources in place and, and know what they want to do. And so before we actually get into the 6 competitive intelligence tools, which is where we'll spend all our time today, just a perspective on how these tools should be used and where they fit into the competitive intelligence process. Because the first thing you need to do with competitive intelligence is you want to just make sure you know how you're going to use it. The last thing you want to do with competitive intelligence is when somebody says, well, what do we want to know about our competition? When somebody says, we want to know everything about our competition, that's a very bad way to answer the question. Because the important thing about a competitive intelligence process or business intelligence is it's focused. You're focused on what you need to know, why you need to know it, when do you need to know it by, And then what are you going to do with it? Because this is the way that all of that intelligence is used in a way that it can be applied to have companies achieve their goals. And it really comes down to 3 particular areas that people use in the process of doing competitive intelligence. One is public intelligence, kind of large enterprise services like LexisNexis or Hoover's. The area that has really taken off in terms of being so many sources to understand the competition now is the area of social intelligence. If you think about it, even just as little as 5 or 6 years ago, really it was LinkedIn and Sean Parker's now-defunct Plaxo that was the way that we found out about our competition online. But now it's every social network and the tools that you'll hear about in this webinar. And there's human intelligence— surveys, people going to events, interviews with industry thought leaders. These are all the ways that competitive intelligence is used in a process that's based on goals and well-planned direction. But today we're going to talk about some of the areas in the social intelligence and the tools that can be available online to be able to find out about your competition. And I've taken 6 competitive intelligence tools from 6 experts that we're going to talk about here. You may know some of these tools already, or you may not, but we're going to go through each one with case-by-case examples, and I will be sharing screenshots just to show you how they work. And I also just wanted to say that as far as, you know, I know when I view a webinar, I'm not naive enough to think that you're not checking your emails or maybe on another browser. So one of the things that I'll do as I go through these tools is point you to the URL. They all have a— the common element of all of them is that they all work by a query box. So as I'm going through these particular tools, if you want to open up a browser and try it with a competitor or a website of your own, feel free to, because this is really how I think we can use the webinar very effectively. So let's get right into it. And let's take competitive intelligence tool number 1. And I'll tell you who's— and that tool is Google Trends. And the expert who's recommending Google Trends is Avinash Kaushik, the head evangelist, digital evangelist at Google. And the reason, because all of these tools are going to have a specific slant on competitive or business intelligence. That you would use Google Trends is it's an excellent tool to give you online search information that shows how often specific keywords or phrases or topics are being queried over a specific period of time. Basically what Google Trends is, is Google's entire catalog of keywords since they've been monitoring them, which they take when you put them in and turn them into a trend line. And so think of Google Trends is really the Library of Congress of keywords online. And if you're looking to try to look at it as I take you through this, the URL is google.com/trends. Let me show you a couple ways that this Google Trends can be used, or has been used in my experience. I did a little workshop with Verizon, and I did this back in April of 2010. 2014, just before the Galaxy S4 was about to be launched, Verizon's most important new product introduction for the year. And the people in the room wanted to sort of get a sense of what the early adopters, the young people who would basically be putting the word out of how this was a hot new phone, what the level of interest was in the Galaxy S4. So one particular person went to Google Trends, and in the query box at the— on the page google.com/trends. They put in 2 words that they thought might be relevant to their target audience of young people. One was the Galaxy S4, and one was somebody else that might have been topical to that audience, and that was Justin Bieber. They trended those 2 phrases, and they saw that just about at the time the phone was launching, if you follow this red box, that the Galaxy S4 actually had more buzz about it on the internet than did Justin Bieber. A very creative use of how you could use Google Trends to sort of look at what might be topical phrases, and how does your brand fit in terms of being in line with where things are going. Google Trends actually also changed the course of my career, and in a way that I never look back in terms of being grateful for. I worked in large advertising agencies up until around 2009 when I started my own business because I had a client who was willing to give me a project that would make it worthwhile for me to go out on my own. But it was a tough time. The economy was in a bad state and marketing was always the first thing to be cut. And as a marketing consultant, I was on the internet one day and saw that the need for marketing consultants, this blue line, was really not going anyplace in a hurry. So I thought to myself, well, I'm really just a marketing person. What else could I be doing? How else could I be repositioning what I do? And so I put in the phrases digital marketing and social media marketing, and you could see how interest in those areas has grown. So it's a great tool really for understanding from a standpoint of competitive or business intelligence what are the keywords or topics that people are really interested in these days and what are they not interested in. The next tool I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to talk about 2 tools that are used to basically monitor competitors' websites, is Compete. Now, you can't use Compete— this is the only paid service that I have of the 6 competitive intelligence tools. It comes to us from Sam Crocker of Moz, who is one of the industry experts who really thinks highly of it. It's a great tool for monitoring website traffic. So I'm bringing it to your attention because of its value. It looks at about the top million websites in the US. But I'm going to— but it costs about $200 a month to use. So I'm going to give you an example with a screenshot of how it's used to sort of show you how you might monitor your competitors. This is a graph of what you might see in Compete if you were looking at 3 particular websites. I've used here the website Amazon.com. Best Buy, and Walmart. And I looked at them over the course of a year. And what I did in this instance was, as you can see, the website traffic of all of them sort of stays steady throughout the year except for the period of October through the end of the year, when of course there's higher seasonality due to the Christmas season. But the interesting thing to me about this chart is basically the difference between Amazon and Best Buy and the other 2 competitors. As you can see, the other 2 competitors, Best Buy and Walmart, are almost in lockstep starting as early as October. But it's Amazon that really sort of peaks just about the end of the year or just around Christmas time. And of course, this is due to their policy of 2-day shipping. But if you were Amazon, this is terrific information to use in terms of how do you manage your resources. When Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes, if I were working at Amazon, I would say, let Walmart and Best Buy generate all this awareness for me. I'll even take, you know, give people that work with me time off because when Christmas time comes, that week before Christmas, nobody's going to be able to leave their desk. We'll be so busy managing orders for all the people who are now coming to us to make their purchases because they waited till the last minute or they're taking advantage of free shipping. So this is a good tool to show you how to manage your marketing and manage your resources. A free tool that does essentially a lot of the same information, and also a subsidiary of Amazon, is a tool called Alexa.com. And it's great for managing web traffic, too. At Alexa.com, you put in, in the query box, the name of your website. So if I were doing Biznology, I would do it as Biznology.com. It's not a keyword I can put in there. in the website address, but if I went in there, I would be taken to a page that would look like something like this. I did this particular screenshot for the— and search for the allergy medication Allegra, and as I— what would happen is if you go to the Alexa page is that you would get a page that looks like this, and I'm going to take you through the screenshot as you would scroll down the page. You would see the, the brand. You would see what its website rank was, both among all websites in the US and all websites in the world. You would be able to see basic web analytic information like bounce rate, how many people left after just viewing one page, how many pages they view in general, how much time is in your site. And because of the cookies that we carry with us, you're even going to get some audience information about the demographics of your audience, which would be done on kind of an index basis where this line sort of separates those people who are above or below national averages. The interesting thing to me about this is that Allegra's audience, which I would have expected to be more female, is actually more male and pretty college-educated and pretty well-educated. So you can get a lot of good information, in this case, about your competitors not just your website traffic, but even who their users are. If you're in the business of advertising, or especially in the business of paid search, there's a tool called Keyword Spy, which Mark Burtell of Search Engine Journal has recommended as a great tool, and certainly has a great name for a competitive or business intelligence tool. But it's, it's at keywordspy.com. Again, what you do is just put the keywords that you want to have in there, and especially if you're in that business, where you need to know what your competitors might be spending or what you want to spend, you can put the word in there. I've put in the keyword competitive intelligence, and you can see just how much volume there is behind it every month, what the cost per click is of that particular keyword. You can see some of the other keywords that are related to it, and really just a wealth of information for media planning and how many other people are using it and what the bids are on it. So it's a great tool if you're in the business of trying to understand what your competitors might be spending or what a word is worth. It can tell you how many competitors there are in it, just how many ads are running. Just a great tool for that purpose. So there are an awful lot of tools to manage basically what's happening on social media these days. And one that I think is particularly valuable that doesn't often show up always. It's a newer tool and it's free. It is a tool called Social Searcher. And that's a tool that basically is a search engine for social networks and gives you real-time monitoring and analytics. And one of the reasons that I like this tool so much is that I think the dashboards on it are really, really pretty good. So let's show you what this tool is like. So if I put in a phrase here and I go to— I get in the top, you'll see I have 2 places I can go. I can get the search results where I would see exactly the tweets or the Facebook posts or the Google+ posts that were actually said, and I can see the actual text. Or I can click on the analytics post. I get that choice as well, and I can see a wealth of information in dashboard form that I could really kind of use for purposes of letting people know not only what's being said, but where it's coming from and the type of things that are being mentioned. For example, if I put in a certain word that I wanted to use, I could first see what the volume of posts occurred were from day to day or month or over the course of 30 days. I could see what social network they were coming from and how that was going. And I could see what types of information was being posted from each social network. So in this word that I put in for Social Searcher, I can see that on Facebook, the primary thing that people are doing when they put this particular word in is is they're posting a video on it. In Twitter, they're actually posting a link. And in Google+, they're also most often posting a link. So I know from the word I was searching where the volume of the information is coming from, what often is the thing that people are communicating with it in addition to the words that they're using. And I also can know what the audience sentiment is. This is a phrase from Social Searcher that actually gives you a sentiment analysis. A sentiment analysis is basically whether when people post, they say something that's positive or negative. And this is done through a machine kind of looking at the words and describing from what's there whether it's a positive or negative post. And I can see for this particular word that the sentiment on Facebook was particularly positive. On Twitter, it was kind of neutral. And on Google+, it was particularly positive. So this is information that would be extremely valuable, both in terms of if I was working for the brand or the industry that I was researching with these keywords. I could see either where I wanted to be spending my attention, where the where the testimony and the sentiment was most positive, or I might be listening for what might be negative information or what might be neutral information that might be coming out on Twitter. So I can use it for research, or I can use it for really spreading the word a little bit more. And finally, I'm going to take you through a tool that comes from HubSpot. It's called Marketing Grader, and it's recommended by the CMO at HubSpot, Mike Volpe. And it's a tool for really understanding how your website is set up and how optimized it is. Simply what you do when you go to marketing.grader.com is you enter the name of your website. It will ask you for your email address, but you don't have to do that. You do it just like you did with Alexa. You put the name of the website in, like biznology.com, and you'll get a grade. I did this for our website. Farnraisersllc.com. That grade is basically a function of what is important for a website to have so that it's generating good results with the search engines and it's generating good outreach. The grade is really a function of how well your website is set up in terms of having a blog, being able to share information on social media, some SEO information, which I'll get a little bit deeper into in the next slide, any lead generation elements that you have, and whether your site is mobile optimized. Because these days, 30% or more of traffic to a website is coming from a mobile device. And this whole Marketing Grader platform was recently upgraded a couple years ago to take advantage of all the changes that are happening that make social media and blogging and mobile optimization very important. So it's a good tool to use with a client in a very basic way to sort of let them know just how they're doing. I'm drilling into the SEO area a little bit more here, and when I drill into the SEO tab for our business, I can see that I get some information as to the authoritative links that are driving my website traffic. I get information as to how many pages on search engines our company's site is listed on. In this case, they're called indexed pages. On the right-hand side, you can see there are 972 pages on the internet that we're on, how many inbound links we have, which is 357, and some of the inbound links that are listed as authoritative. One is that I blog for Biznology, and that's listed as an authoritative link. I live in New Canaan, Connecticut, and my office is in Wilton. I spoke at the Chamber of Commerce, and apparently the Chamber of Commerce has a high authority too. It tells you kind of what are the links that are valuable that you might want to be searching out in future posts or content that you put out on your site. I've rifled through a good number of slides and tools here, and I hope it's been helpful to you. Now I'm going to turn it back to Chris.

Thanks, Rob. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to use these competitive intelligence tools, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions from our audience teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own questions by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for corporations who want to apply what they learn directly to their own business and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Tom, Peter, and Mike Moran teach you search marketing course Teach the search marketing course and will be there to guide you and help you persuade that executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all our offerings. We're about to start firing questions at Rob, but we need to thank our sponsors once again.

Ding!

BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. Yaris Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. MENG, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job, we are about staying current to grow in our careers. Now on to your questions. Okay, Rob, the first question is, how many of these tools are free, and do I need to pay for them And if they are free, are there any advantages from the premium models?

Good question, and thanks for asking that. That's a really good clarifying question. All of the tools except for Compete that I offered up here are free tools. Compete is the only one that's a paid tool. It's about $200 a month. And it's thought of as one of the better competitive intelligence tools compared to The other one that was used was Alexa, which is also very good. It just has a bigger panel. It has about 2 million people on the panel versus Alexa that has a million people on its panel. But some of the free services— Alexa is a good example— are services that offer a bit at the free level but also have subscription models. So Alexa, which the slides I showed you in this webinar are free, There's also a paid model that goes, I think their increments are starting at $50 and go to $150 a month. And those models, they give much more detailed information about web analytics of particular competitors. And the advantages of them are, of all of them paid or free, is they really just give you a lot of information about a client that I think always surprises the people you're working with. I can say that I've never gone into a new business presentation without using some of these tools for the prospective client, and without exception, it's always taught that prospective client something about their business they didn't know. So I hope I answered that question for you.

Yes, thank you. Another question is, if I'm starting from the ground floor, a lot of the terminology and content and context of a lot of the sites you were showing us don't make any sense to me. How can I learn more about things like backlinks and reputation and those sorts of things that you mentioned in the presentation?

Sure. A couple of the tools, Alexis in particular and marketinggrader.com. Well, the best way to learn about backlinks is to learn about what are credit links. And so of the tools that were shown here, the 6 tools, the tools that do get into links are Alexa and marketinggrader.com. Both of those look at links and both of those tools would show you, not only in telling you the number of links that go to a particular site, what are the ones that they consider to be authoritative links. And so looking at the number of links and looking at what are considered to be the authoritative links, they would give you a background on the value of links and the type of links that would be important based on their authority. So for example, when I used the Marketing Grader tool and I could see that we had 357 inbound links, basically the equivalent of backlinks, then what we— and I can look at what they were, one being Biznology, one being the Chamber of Commerce in the town where our office is. I could see that basically the type of thought leadership type of sites or community sites that had high value were things that were good things for for our business to be on, and I would try to court out more opportunities to be on sites like that. So that's how basically these tools and the terminology, since you asked about backlinks, can be used for that purpose.

Excellent. And as more sort of— this is Chris Abraham— as more background and insight, I think there's a couple websites like I mean, obviously Wikipedia is a good source for information with regards to what things mean. And there's a number of SEO type of blogs and search engines— I mean, blogs and resources. What are your favorite SEO and SEM blogs, Rob? Sure.

And actually, they were used here from the experts. I think Search Engine Journal, which was, I believe, used for Keyword Spy, is an excellent SEO blog to be reading. And also the Moz blog, which was used as the expert for the Compete competitive intelligence tool. Those are probably my 2 favorite SEO blogs.

Well, thank you. I have one more question that seems to be about one of our sponsors. Michael Stricker asks, thanks for naming names. Where can I learn more about MENG? So I would just search MENG on Google, and it should probably be easier for you to find. It's Marketing Executives Networking Group. I assume there's all kinds of chapters, but we have the New Jersey chapter as a sponsor. Let's see. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much, Rob, for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. Thank you, Mike. If any of you had questions— you're welcome, my pleasure. This was really interesting for me too, because there are so many tools that I'm just blind to. They are right out of my blind spot, and I learn every time I I am. If any of you had any questions that we did not have any time— did not have the time to answer, you can email your question to Eileen, eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Rob for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar, video recording actually, so you'll be able to watch it. To listen to again and to share with others. And we also invite you to mark your calendars for our next technology webinar with Heather Lloyd-Martin, 5 Ways a Content Audit Can Drive New Traffic, Boost Rankings, and Save You Time, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on February 24th. We hope to see everybody back there then. Bye, everybody. Bye.