Free Competitor and Market Intelligence Tools for marketers and businesses – my discovery journey from one Chartered Marketer to the world of marketers (via screen grabs)

On Wednesday morning (20 May 2015) as elected Chair of the CIM Ireland board I presented The Chartered Institute of Marketing SME survey findings at a breakfast event hosted at Ulster University Business School. Trying to make it less death by PowerPoint and more action focused for the audience I added a few of my tips and SME stories alongside practical advice from 2 of the 2014 Ireland Marketing Excellence Award winning local SME case studies provided by fellow Chartered Marketer Eimear Kearney, founder of the Inaugural River to Lough festival and Caroline McComb from family business: McCombs luxury coach hire, founder of McCombs Game of Throne tours – both new product/service developments with lessons for us all.

As promised, following my mentions of Alexa and Google trends, I have highlighted the kind of intelligence you can glean from tools courtesy of the new digital era that we marketers live in using Investni.com and cim.co.uk as examples.

Happy CPD

Christine

P.S. don’t forget to tweet @watsonmydear using #watsonsmarketing and @ciminfo_ireland using #CIMSmallBiz15

Free Competitor and Market Intelligence Tools for marketers and businesses – my discovery journey from one Chartered Marketer to the world of marketers (via screen grabs)

1. Facebook Advertising insights

Click on Adverts Manager

Click on Create an Advert (don’t worry you can utilise the intelligence from this without hitting submit on the button that then charges you!)

Choose the objective for your campaign from the options provided

Choose any of your pages and any of your posts

Then voila:

And: 98,000 people within 20km of Belfast aged 21 to 65 have expressed an interest in ‘marketing’ therefore can potentially be reached via the Facebook platform

Interesting to apply this to the tourism industry and 10,000 ‘men’ within 20km of Craigavon have an interest in ‘fishing’.

So, you can see how use of this tool can be useful for reporting and more.

‘Pages to Watch’ from Facebook Can be a Source of Competitive Insight

Further reading: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebooks-pages-to-watch/

2. Facebook IQ

www.insights.fb.com

“Understanding the people who matter to you, so you can be what matters to them”.
Every day, everywhere, people turn to Facebook to connect, share, discover, get informed and get inspired. By harnessing Facebook insights and working with world-class researchers, Facebook IQ can help marketers understand people across generations, geographies, devices and time. With more than 1.39 billion people on Facebook*, spending an average of 36 minutes** per day on the platform, Facebook IQ are able to offer information about consumer attitudes and behaviours that marketers are unable to find elsewhere.

Facebook IQ claim to be a team of thought leaders, researchers, writers, trend spotters, sociologists, anthropologists and scientists, who bring world-leading expertise to their data analysis and storytelling. Facebook IQ can provide marketers a true understanding of people—who they are, what they do and why they do it. They look at what drives people to stop, look, feel, share, do and buy. They then translate what these insights mean for brands.

Real Life. Real Insight. Real Action.

*Based on Facebook internal data, Dec 2014.
**Based on Comscore Media Metrix, Dec 2014.”

So, say we had a restaurant client here in Belfast:

We can look at hot topics the same month the year before and viola:

To read the report in full in PDF (potentially as higher quality images) visit: https://fbinsights.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/facebookiq_hot_topic_april-2015_uk1.pdf

Quarterly Highlights:

Facebook Quarterly Highlights

February 20, 2014

Each quarter, Facebook IQ provide an update on the state of their business. Highlights for the fourth quarter of 2014 are as follows:

Daily active users (DAUs) were 890 million on average for December 2014, an increase of 18% year-over-year.
Mobile DAUs were 745 million on average for December 2014, an increase of 34% year-over-year.
Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.39 billion as of December 31, 2014, an increase of 13% year-over-year.
Mobile MAUs were 1.19 billion as of December 31, 2014, an increase of 26% year-over-year.

Video grew to an average of more than 3 billion video views per day on Facebook
Over 65% of Facebook video views occur on mobile
We have more than 2B interactions every week between public figures and their fans
Instagram reached 300M monthly actives, with more than 70% outside the US
WhatsApp reached 700M monthly active, with more than 30B messages sent each day
More than 150M people in Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, and Colombia can connect to the internet using Internet.org

For more information: http://newsroom.fb.com/

Relatively painless sign up process:

3. Google Trends

www.google.co.uk/trends

Start by adding the Search Terms you want to compare

Scroll down to view interest in different regions

And to view related searches

You can also view data from specific dates

To view the top charts for the last year follow the below link

www.google.co.uk/trends/topcharts

4. Alexa

www.alexa.com

Start by entering the competitor web address you want to view

You can view lots of different information on your competitors websites with this free service. I have used the CIM website as an example to demonstrate how much insight alexa.com can give you.