Strategy. It sounds so mysterious—devious, even. Do other team members think we sit in a room all day scheming complicated marketing plans? While brainstorm sessions are important, the Strategy Team here at CHIEF mostly employs the use of digital tools to help us draw data that we then analyze and use to inform marketing strategy decisions. Below are three of our team’s favorite tools:
Rival IQ:
How many people like your competitor’s page on Facebook? How often are they posting? What was their most retweeted tweet? Rival IQ can provide you with these answers—and more! Rival IQ is digital marketing analytics software that allows us to understand the competitive landscapes of our clients. Rival IQ delivers important insights into a digital marketing presence, including social media performance, SEO keyword rankings and website content. Best of all, Rival IQ analyzes and aggregates this data to deliver interactive and easy to understand analytics of what is happening both for your company and across your competitive landscape. Users can export datasets and graphical representations to be used in analytics reports and presentations.
Integrity:
If you’ve ever done a content inventory, chances are you’ve used a link crawler—unless you enjoy coping, pasting and checking hundreds upon hundreds (or even hundreds of thousands) of links. We are partial to Integrity, by Peacock Media. Integrity scans your site, checking for all internal, external and broken links, as well as images and files. Finding broken links is especially important, because they are dead ends for your visitors and can interfere with your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Integrity’s fast and accurate data can then be exported to Excel where strategists will comb over the results to develop a content audit and migration plan.
Google Analytics:
While we’re sure this isn’t some major breakthrough (it’s the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet), Google Analytics is worth mentioning because of the immense value it provides. Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that monitors and reports website traffic. Integrated with AdWords, Google Analytics helps us set and monitor campaign goals by tracking landing page quality and conversions. The newly redesigned interface displays high-level dashboard-type data for a novice user and more in-depth data that our strategy teams digs into to uncover important insights—like what pages are performing poorly, where visitors came from (referrals), how long they stayed and their geographic location. It also provides more advanced features, including custom reporting options and multi-dashboard displays. Google Analytics has become ubiquitous in our field and we have several team members that are certified in the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ)—and certifiably awesome, too.
Hopefully we’ve demystified a key component of the work our strategists carry out and introduced you to, or stressed the importance of, a few tools we use in our work every day. Are you a marketing professional or just a plain #DataNerd? What are some of the digital tools you use to meet marketing goals?