In today’s world, information and data is more readily available than ever before. The problem with all of this information, or big data, is that it is meaningless unless you have a way of discerning it in a practical manner. This becomes especially tricky when this abundance of data creates expectations for data driven ROI (Return On Investment).

With the right business intelligence tools, you can make sure that you’re gaining the actionable insights you need in order to bring in good results and increase your ROI. And because you’re in the business of online marketing, what you really need is Marketing Intelligence.

Marketing Intelligence is the process of gathering all the world’s online media data and presenting it in a useful and accessible way to allow for better decision making. And what better way to gain your Marketing Intelligence than through the top Marketing Intelligence tools?

But let’s take it one step further. Let’s say we don’t want to make deductions based on the insights from one specific tool. We want to combine these tools in order to approach these insights from different perspectives in order to really maximize our results. But where do we start and how do we do this?

This blog is the first in a five part series that will show you exactly how you can integrate the top Marketing Intelligence tools in order to gain the insights you need to create the best digital campaign possible and bring in outstanding results.

Let’s begin!

Imagine you’re a small to medium business owner in the travel industry who needs to figure out how to plan and launch the perfect online campaign. You don’t know where to begin, who to target, or what campaigns to run — you’re starting from zero!’

Wait a minute. You don’t have to start from zero. In fact, you shouldn’t; that’s the whole point of Marketing Intelligence!

With Marketing Intelligence, you will be able to uncover the online marketing strategies of your competitors and top influencers, enabling you to create an optimal campaign and strategy based on what has proved to work while avoiding what has proved to fail.

So you see, rather than waiting at the starting line, you’re already 4 laps ahead of everyone else. Did I mention you still have all that money in your pocket because you didn’t waste it on trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t?

But back to you.

As a medium-size travel company, you’ve got to choose a competitor or top influencer in your industry, so for the sake of it, let’s go with TripAdvisor.

The first thing you’ve got to do is uncover TripAdvisor’s entire online marketing strategy in order to see what campaigns they are running, what keywords they are using, which countries they are targeting, which traffic sources/publishers work best for them, what creatives they are using, what their landing pages look like, and so forth.

By doing this, you’ll be able to figure out such things as:

• Which publishers or sites you should run your ads on
• If you should have geo-targeted campaigns; and if so, which countries you should target
• What your monthly and yearly ad budget should look like
• How to choose keywords that can help your PPC ads convert

So now that you know what your first step is, how can you actually access this information?

Easy. By using the top Marketing Intelligence tools out there: AdClarity, SimilarWeb, and SpyFu.

And before we start integrating these tools to pull out valuable insights that can make or break our campaigns, let me quickly give you a quick summary of what each tool can do for you.

AdClarity

AdClarity is a Marketing intelligence tool for anyone who works in the online advertising industry. Regardless if you are an Advertiser, Agency, Publisher, or Ad Network, AdClarity can provide you with the actionable insights you need to create the best possible online media campaigns for you or your clients.

By uncovering your competitors’ online media strategies, you can discover new traffic sources or publishers to work with, see which traffic sources are most successful, see what the best creatives, landing pages, offerings, and campaigns are, and extend your own reach by discovering untapped markets and audiences, growing your own client base, and increasing brand awareness.

Did I mention that AdClarity also lets you see where and how your competitors are geo-targeting their ads and content amongst different countries and cultures? This is an incredibly useful tool when it comes down to ad localization.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is an online presence research tool that helps you discover the most important traffic insights for any website. SimilarWeb makes web analytics simple and accessible to everyone, showing you the story behind any website with data that will help you analyze your competitor’s web traffic and identify growth opportunities online.

With SimilarWeb, you can understand your competitors’ website’s engagement metrics, such as visits, duration, and bounce rate. You can optimize your PPC and SEO campaigns based on your competitors’ top keywords, including not-provided keywords and discover how much traffic each keyword drives to your competitors, from paid and organic search.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a competitive intelligence based resource tool which is used for improving SEO and PPC campaigns. SpyFu shows you which keywords your competitors are buying and which ones they optimize their site for. They show how a history of high-performing keywords and copy can help you develop PPC ads that convert. For SEO, you can also research keywords along with backlinks and top-ranking content ideas to map a strong campaign.

The simplicity of SpyFu helps those new to the industry keep from getting overwhelmed, but the data is deep enough to satisfy experienced pros. They get an edge from SpyFu’s AdWords recommendations built on competitors’ bidding history. They can see which copy their competitors dropped after testing, and they can pull in new keyword ideas to buy.

Keyword research itself helps them see what is ranking and what ranking factors those pieces of content share. SpyFu’s PPC and SEO tools shave off hours of work and cut out much of the testing you’d have to do yourself.

We’re now ready to take the first step in creating the perfect campaign. Stay tuned for blog post 2 and see what we can discover by combining insights from both AdClarity and SimilarWeb.