Tools to Help You Monitor Your Competition

Are you doing enough to monitor your competition? You can't claim the lead, or even keep pace, unless you know how key market challengers place in the race for customers. You need to regularly collect and analyze actionable data, and a recent article by John Koehler for Sales Benchmark Index provides some helpful tools. For example, Koehler uses the “SEO Site Tools” on his Chrome browser to pull data on competitors' external pages, page elements, social media, page terms, and domain information. He also cites Spyfu, SEMRush and ispionage as ways to capture competitors' paid and organic search keywords, rank performance, ppc ad creative and estimated PPC budgets. For social media, tools like Klout, Kred and Peerindex can measure social accounts influence, outreach and authority. To help you put it all together, Koehler even offers a downloadable competitor comparison worksheet! Check out his article at http://www.salesbenchmarkindex.com/bid/95603/Keep-Your-Friends-Close-and-Your-Competitors-Closer

Study Rates Social Media As Retail 'Backwater'

Retailers still aren't reaping big sales from social media. A new global study from PwC, the global consultancy, found that only 12% of global consumers bought anything through social media last year. Social media buzz also didn't drive sales to brick-and-mortar or online stores. Only 18% of consumers active in social media made a purchase as a result of information from social-media connections. The overall conclusion of the report was that "social media will, for the near future, remain a backwater sales channel, if you can call it a sales channel at all." For more on the study, read the Marketing Daily report at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/192985/study-for-stores-social-media-still-a-bust.html#axzz2PWjgrD9V