5 Tools for Digital Marketing Research!

In the words of advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy Group, "Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals." Knowing and understanding your customers' and consumers' needs and wants, buying habits, how they research products and services, and competitors' actions are key in providing the right products and services at the right time, in the right way. 

Now more than ever, it is easy to find a lot of this preliminary information online through tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and BuiltWith. Most of this information can be attained for free, using various digital marketing tools. I have been fortunate to have mentor-bosses and course instructors teach me about some incredible tools and techniques that I am excited to share with you. Today, we will focus on five tools: LinkedIn, Facebook, SpyFu, BuiltWith, and Website Grader. 

1. LinkedIn

The professional network can be a great way to learn more about your current customers and consumers. On LinkedIn, many people fill out information about their professional history, education, experience, interests, volunteering activities, and more. You can look up individuals by name, company, job function, and geographic location, and find years of experience and other details to build personas. Particularly B2B professionals can look up and connect with companies, find key decision makers, and nurture leads.

If your company has a LinkedIn profile (Company Page), you can use it to learn about the general makeup of your current audience and find a suitable way to market to them. You can track follower demographics by seniority, industry, company size, and job function. If your company does not have a company page or group, it may be a good idea to set one up and begin building a presence and nurturing a community on the network.

2. Facebook 

Facebook has many business tools. Today, I'll focus on two in particular: "Audience Insights" and "Pages to Watch". Audience Insights lets you gather and study information about various audience groups on Facebook. You can narrow your search to a specific geographic area, job titles or roles, industry, gender, age range, and more. Facebook then presents you with information including demographics, household information, purchasing trends, Facebook activity, likelihood to click ads, and Lifestyle breakdowns of demographics through Personicx.

The Pages to Watch feature allows you to follow competitor Facebook pages or pages you admire and want to emulate. You can compare total page likes, week-over-week changes in likes, posts this week, and engagements this week. This information gives you concrete data to benchmark against. To use this feature, you need at least 100 page likes and choose at least 5 Pages to Watch.

3. SpyFu

SpyFu is a great tool for assessing competitors' digital marketing efforts, as well as your own. You enter a specific website address, and SpyFu presents information about the website's SEO, Inbound Clicks from Google (Backlinks), paid search, ranking, and more. The site also shows estimated budgets, keywords, and competitor listings. For SEO, SpyFu gives you the organic keywords your competitors rank for, monthly SEO clicks, and an estimated monetary SEO click value. Backlinks are broken down into organic versus paid clicks.

Paid Search data is primarily drawn from AdWords and shows your competitors' paid keywords, estimated monthly PPC clicks, and an estimated monthly AdWords budget. You can access information about your competitors' top paid and organic keywords, their negative keywords, and their most-used keywords. This tool provides an in-depth view of what competitors are doing, along with ideas and direction for what your company can do.

4. BuiltWith 

BuiltWith is a website that lets you check competitor websites or sites you admire to see which platforms, tools, and plug-ins they use to sharpen your competitive edge. You get a full technology profile including Web Servers, Hosting Providers, Email Services, Content Management Systems, and Analytics and Tracking. BuiltWith can be used for free. You can create a free account for trend history and detailed data. The paid account also provides access to more features, but the free account still offers detailed information and data.

You can also use BuiltWith to track your own website if you no longer work with your web or blog designer and need to find the systems you have used in the past to recover or replace them. 

5. HubSpot's Website Grader

The Website Grader, powered by HubSpot, is a free tool that scores your website or blog against key metrics such as SEO, performance, mobile, and security. For SEO, the grader looks at page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and sitemaps. Performance looks at page size, page requests, and page speed to offer tips on areas to improve and optimize your website's performance. Mobile looks at your website's responsiveness across devices and viewports, and how your page scales. Security looks at your SSL certificate.

This tool allows you to assess your website, which is typically a company's most important marketing hub, to ensure that it is fully optimized and ranking high during searches. 

This article is not an all-encompassing list of the tools you can use for digital marketing research. Rather, the aim is to give a rough idea of some of the deeper uses of the platforms regularly employed for a competitive edge in business. Many tools are free or low-cost, so give them a try. What tools do you use for your digital marketing research? Please share your "live by" tools in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!