This guest column is by Andy Donaldson, Director, Hit Search
Innovating your business is crucial in order to remain competitive in your industry. Innovation doesn’t have to mean a complete overhaul of your products or services, you can simply innovate the way you market your business. Here are 5 creative marketing tools that every business should try out:
-
Generate content ideas with Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a content resource used by many marketers around the globe on a daily basis. You might have already realised this, but generating unique content ideas can be a time-consuming task; with Buzzsumo you can search by topic or domain for the latest trending content, helping you gauge which topics are most popular on social media. Sharing content that is highly relevant and on-trend with your social audience, can help provoke conversation and opinion amongst your community.
-
Stay on top of your online reputation with Reputology
Reputology is a review platform and is available as an add-on app through the Hootsuite social media management platform. With Reputology you can actively respond to any negative reviews in real-time, instead of having to check each and every review site. The software can also help your business identify new opportunities; exposing recurring customer complaints, helping inform your future marketing strategies.
The app helps you monitor reviews sites including Yelp, Facebook, Google, Trip Advisor and more.
-
Use Twitter to build your brand with help from Followerwonk
Followerwonk is an app from Moz that helps you find, analyse and optimise for social growth. Finding out who your audience is made up of and when they’re most active, is knowledge you need to be equipped with in order to innovate your business across Twitter. You can also use Followerwonk to keep an eye on your competitor activity, keeping tabs on when they post and when they receive the most post engagement; it’s all insight that can help you build your own Twitter strategy!
-
Get industry updates straight to your inbox with Google Alerts
Google Alerts is perfect if you don’t have the time to trawl the internet on a daily basis looking for news; you can set your alerts to be sent either daily, weekly, or as the news breaks. It’s a good idea to set your alerts up surrounding keywords you want your business to rank for, this strategy can help spark marketing ideas for your own business. If you have a lot of competitors you like to keep an eye on, set their company names up as a Google Alert, too, this way you’ll get notified of any news coverage they receive, enabling you to amend your own strategy accordingly.
-
Find new outreaching opportunities with Majestic
Formerly known as Majestic SEO, Majestic is a link intelligence tool that can help your website understand everything about its backlink profile, from anchor text balance to new and lost links; as a result of this tool you can build a comprehensive SEO strategy for your business. You can also use the tool to monitor the backlink profiles of your competitors by typing their URL into the search bar. From here you can analyse the backlinks they’ve received from third party websites. This strategy can help you determine which third party websites to approach in order to share your content, if they’ve taken the time to mention your competitor, there’s a chance they could accept content from you also.