Competitive Intelligence and the Internet Marketing Conspiracy

Author: stefanthorms

If you are in the Internet marketing industry, you’re probably used to hearing about the "new and exciting" thing or traffic source. If you actually know what's what, you should also know how seriously you should assess ideas like this: you should not at all.
The reason?
Marketing is not that complicated. There are fundamentals you must be aware of, and apart from that everything else is just fine details. One of the most basic fundamental ideas you absolutely must understand about web business (or any marketing at all, now that I think of it), is that when all things are considered it really is a "zero-sum" game. Your audience is not unending, and there are a limited number of dollars available in  the market. Then Internet business is actually about ensuring your service is the one capturing the biggest segment of that audience and those dollars; it’s all about competition.
Consider any Internet marketing channel; Pay per click, SEO, article marketing. It’s all driven by competition. Who is able to afford more for a click, which business has a more highly optimised web site or more backlinks. So one of the more relevant areas of any business’ marketing strategy will be gathering and using competitor intelligence.
But what kind of information is useful? It’s easy enough to gather millions of points of data; so how do we understand which we should use our time on gathering? The important factor for useful analytics-based campaigns is to establish actionable tasks. Business data is unhelpful if it does not result in any kind of change in strategy or tactics.
Take the example: say you were trying to gather business intelligence to turbo-charge your SEO campaign, it would be useful researching what keywords your competition are targeting. It can also make sense to establish how many backlinks the competitor has to their web properties and from which domains these back-links are coming from. When we have this information it's possible to use it to guide the strategy of our content publishing and backlinking campaigns.
How about PPC? For this eg it is pertinent again to establish what keywords other companies in our industry are going after. We then use this data in a couple of instances. Firstly,  we can go after those same keywords specifically – so we will appear in the sponsored ads when our potential leads are searching for related keywords. But we can also determine phrases that our competitors aren’t going after that can be fruitful as a result of not as much competition (therefore lower cost per click).
As you can see, competitive intelligence is handy in the Internet marketing business (find out more about how to attain competitive intelligence in my article on Click Conspiracy). When we manage to continuously stay one step infront of competition, we're much more likely to secure a bigger segment of our limited marketplace. The key here is to make sure that any information we research is used to make actionable steps. Information without a noticeable difference in strategic thinking or resulting behaviour is useless – potentially much worse than this, it can be damaging, because the time it takes for us to work out data is then put to waste.
So, ensure you're using business analytics for the creating of strategies and tactics for your business.

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/http://www.articlealley.com/competitive-intelligence-and-the-internet-marketing-conspiracy-2359232.html

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