2013 brings the need of brands performing on-the-fly marketing to monitor, manage and re-develop an optimal approach to customers at a particular time and place. 2012 saw brands marketing at the speed of culture, but in the current year they will have to be more responsive towards the needs of their customers.
So, now when we know how customers react to the content, how social influencers can help you strengthen your presence and why there is a need to move faster in today’s competitive world, it really makes sense to monitor and manage your marketing efforts in real time.
Real time monitoring is quite challenging. Even when brands understand its importance, they are stuck with where to begin, what tools to use and how to be relevant.
In this article, let us focus on digital tools that can really help you in real time monitoring your marketing efforts. They can monitor both onsite and offsite interaction. Onsite interaction is something that occurs on your site or any other digital space that you own whereas offsite interaction is something that occurs at spaces or places that you do not own. Social networking sites are one example of offsite space.
Tools for Real Time Monitoring
- Google Analytics is one of the most popular onsite tools that help companies view site visitor’s data. Omniture is another tool in this category. However, these are older tools but are still preferred over the new ones.
- There is a new breed of real time monitoring tools such as, Chartbeat, Woopra and Clicky that allow you to see real-time interactions with your site. If you want to know how many visitors are currently on your site and which specific pages they are seeing, these are probably the best tools. Although older tools such as Google Analytics and Omniture also offer this facility but they focus on other things as well.
- GoSquared is another tool that provides real time info on social media influence, top posts, top searches and top referrers. The tool is ideal if you’re looking to know customer-centric views of your site.
- Mixpanel is a more sophisticated tool that analyzes real time segmentation, funnel and retention.
- Lexity is magical tool that helps you know when a single individual arrived on the site, how he/she got there and what pages he/she viewed. It also tells you about whether the order was placed or not.
- There are tools that not only monitor real time interactions, online conversations and audience interests but also suggest you how to craft a content that your audience likes. InboundWriter is an amazing tool in this category that actively helps you in shaping and tailoring the content for different platforms including blogs and social networking sites.
- SocialMention, as the name suggests, is a tool for monitoring more than 100 social media properties. If you are really serious about knowing what’s being said about you anywhere on the web, the tool helps you deal with the challenge.
- Buzzmetrics, BuddyMedia, Radian6 and ScoutLabs that monitor, measure and report your social activity.
- Want to know how influential are those people who are talking about your brand? Klout and PeerIndex are such tools that help you know how influential they are in social media landscape.
Technology has made real time monitoring quite easy. But it’s not sufficient; people using these tools are equally important. So, right combination of talent and technology is required to ensure comprehensive monitoring and management of your marketing efforts.