James Bond Wishes He Had These Tools
If you are in the spy business, you need to have great tools to survive. James Bond had cool spy tools like a watch with a laser, shoes with homing beacons and daggers, wrist band that shot darts, a rolex watch/saw, and every car was chocked full of gadgets. For gadget geeks like me, I look forward to every movie to see what cool tools Q makes available to him.
Now if James Bond were into sales and marketing for businesses, he would be green as envy about the tools that I use.
There are quite a few “spy” tools available both free and paid. My two “go to” tools are buzzsumo.me and spyfu.com. Each of these have some free capability. I pay for the full tool.
Why Spy?
Technically, I am conducting market research. It just sounds cooler to be a spy.
There is a lot to be learned when you look at competitors in your space. I can look at a macro level to see how well the social reach is. I can see what social channels are performing best. I can see what topics within the space are getting traction. I can collect all of this information and adjust my strategies to get better performance.
BUZZSUMO
For example, I am interested in the topic of road cycling. If I want to see how large the interest among others and where that interests lies, I can go to buzzsumo.com and start my research there. I would start by seeing how much content has been produced in the last 6 months on the term “road cycling”.
In this example, there are several articles from the past 6 months with shares on Facebook in excess of 11,000. This tells me that I have a large audience on Facebook interested in Road Cycling. I can dig deep into each one of these websites that produced these articles, as well as see who and where these shares took place.
To continue this example, TomDemerly.com looks like a strong site that deserves a closer look. I can search specifically on the domain to see all the articles produced and how well and where they were shared.
TomDemerly.com on average gets a couple of thousand shares, but there are two topics that knocked the shares out of the park. Those could be topics that I can write about and would want to promote in Facebook.
SPYFU
Now if I find TomDemerly.com especially interesting or perhaps a direct competitor in my space, I might want to learn more about how he markets and drives business to the website. I can turn to my other tool, spyfu.com and run a search on the URL.
There are quite a few things to be learned from spyfu.com. I can research keywords, SEO, backlinks on any website. In this example, I see that the URL drives traffic 100% organically, They are not buying add words to drive traffic to the website. If the site used add words, I would be able to see what those paid words are. I can see other competitors in the space.
Now if I want to get into the space and need help identifying keywords that would drive business to the site, I can scroll down a little further into the tool and get a detailed report on the words that are working for this URL. I can see number of monthly searches. The estimated cost per click. I can see the link that the keyword originates. I can use this information to make decisions about driving traffic to my site if I am in a similar space.
Competitive Research
The term “Spy tools” is an intriguing way to describe solid competitive research. In today’s competitive business environment knowing what your competitors are doing in the online space to gain customers can be tremendously helpful. This is especially true if your business does not have a strong internet presence and wants to drive new customers from the Internet.
With the right tools you can look behind the curtain to see what was published, what paid key words are used, what organic key words are used, and who is paying attention. These tools can jump start website and allow you to tweak along the way.
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