10 FREE digital marketing tools you need to look at!

A Little Present From Igneous Marketing

Which tools do experienced digital marketers rely on to develop their marketing strategies, plans, and programs?  There are many valuable resources to provide insight into target audience behaviour, competitive activity, social media mentions, search keyword volume, current marketing trends, and a host of other useful information.  But did you know that many of the very best are available online to everyone, for free?

Before building your next digital plan, be sure to check out these terrific free tools for input, support and guidance in 10 important areas.

1)    Competitive site traffic: Compete.com estimates the number of U. S. visitors to practically all the top web sites, enabling users to enter up to five website names and receive Traffic Volume for each, along with additional site analytics.  Quantcast.com provides U. S. audience composition stats, including gender, income, age group, visit frequency, and other sites visited.  Alexa.com ranks sites comparatively based on traffic  by millions of its toolbar users.

2)    Search volume: Google Trends lets you enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time.  It calculates how many searches occurred for the entered term(s), compared to total Google searches, and graphs the results. The Hot Searches feature displays the 40 fastest-increasing searches in the U. S., and is updated hourly.  Google Insights enables narrower analysis to compare search volume patterns across specific geographic regions, subject categories, time frames and other Google properties.  Google Traffic Estimator shows predicted search volume, average cost-per-click, and ad positions for specified keywords.

3)    SEO Evaluation: WebsiteGrader.com, a free SEO evaluation tool, grades any site on its SEO effectiveness, based on factors including title, meta description, keywords, headings, images, Google Page Rank, inbound links, Google indexed pages, directory inclusion, and Delicious bookmarks.  Entering your own url or a competitor's delivers a quick SEO assessment.

4)    Competitive search activity: SpyFu.com reports the keywords a website buys on Google Adwords and the keywords causing a site to rank in search results. It also provides cost per click, search volume, and estimated search advertising spend. Other available information includes keywords used, organic search rank, top competitors, sites purchasing specific terms, and sites ranking organically for a given query.

5)    Social media dialogue: SocialMention.com tracks the most current conversations about a company, product, or any other topic across the social media landscape, encompassing blogs, forums, bookmarks, comments, events, news, etc., by monitoring over 100 social media properties like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and YouTube. Technorati.com is the leading blog search engine, indexing over a million blogs, tracking the authority and influence of blogs, while providing an index of what is currently most popular in the Blogosphere.

6)    Twitter monitoring: TweetMeme.com aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which are popular, organizing these into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, so it's easy to filter and find what you are most interested in.  Klout.com measures influence on Twitter (and Facebook), on a scale from 0 to 100, using variables like the number of retweets, the Twitter audience size, and influence of followers, while also providing influence monitoring tools.

7)    Social media case studies:  To keep abreast of social media marketing activity by industry leaders or competitors, visit these wikis/sites, which provide a wide range of case studies.  For Social Media Cases across all industries, check out A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples. If you're focused on the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, read the cases at the Dose of Digital Social Media Wiki.

8)    Sample Size Calculator: If you aren't a statistician, but require a simple, quick way to quantify the validity of your results, or establish the correct quantities for an in-market test, either of these two tools will do the trick: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm or http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html.

9)    Online Advertising Impact: Both DoubleClick Research and Atlas Institute Insights regularly publish valuable white papers with insightful analyses of online media performance impact, benchmarks and trends.

10) Marketing Stats and Presentations: Slideshare.com lets you share presentations, or view documents written by others, across a whole range of topics and industries. PewInternet.org is an ongoing research project providing a rich resource of trends and statistics about consumer usage of digital channels.

These are among the most powerful, free tools that equip digital marketers to plan and analyze more effectively, but if you have other personal favourites, please share them by posting or emailing.

10 Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll usually have to wear a number of different hats during the day to day running of your business and it’s not easy to be an expert in many different areas.

Marketing your business effectively is critical to its short and long term success, so here we’ve identified 10 of the most common online marketing mistakes small businesses make.

Not identifying a target market

Before you do any marketing at all, it pays to have a clear idea of who your product or service is aimed at. When it comes to designing your website and writing the content for it, you need to appeal to the people you want to buy your product or service and connect with them.

Not doing enough research

If your small business is offering a new or innovative product or service, how do you know that people will either need it or want it? The time to find out is not when you’ve had a website designed and spent a fortune on Google Adwords with little or no return; it’s at the planning stage.

Building a poor quality DIY website

In 2009, almost £50 billion was spent on internet retail sales in the UK, so if you want a share of the online market, your website will need to be up to scratch. There’s fierce competition online in almost every market sector so a poor quality website that looks homemade will not do you any favours at all.

Communicating features rather than benefits

Confusing features and benefits when it comes to website copy is a very common mistake. Let’s say you were selling golf balls online, a feature could be that they have a titanium core but why would that interest the reader? The benefit would be that you can hit them longer distances which of course would appeal to most golfers.

Advertising once and giving up

It’s widely accepted that people often have to see an advert or brand name 6 or 7 times before they will act on it. So if you decide to advertise your business online via Pay per Click, it pays to run a campaign consistently rather than doing it once and deciding it’s the wrong way to market your business.

Copying your competitors

Whether you’re trying to compete at a local or national level, copying your competitors is never a good idea whether it’s having very similar content on your website or using the same words on your Pay per Click adverts. Be innovative, do something different and people will notice your business.

Focusing all your attention on getting new business

It’s all too easy as a small business to concentrate on gaining new customers and forgetting about your previous or existing ones. Email marketing is a cost effective way to communicate with your client base and help keep them as loyal customers.

Not advertising when you’re doing well

If you fail to market your business when things are going well then you will find it difficult to expand as well as potentially missing out on lucrative orders for the future. For example shutting down a successful Pay per Click campaign or deciding to stop emailing past customers doesn’t make good business sense.

Having separate online and offline messages

It’s important to treat your online and offline marketing as one overall strategy. Too many small businesses fall into the trap of not combining their marketing efforts and end up with a haphazard approach that’s confusing to customers.

Failing to measure your marketing results

If you don’t measure your marketing results, how will you know what marketing efforts are worth continuing with and what’s losing you money? A simple “How did you find us?” option on an online contact form or analysing your Pay per Click statistics regularly can help you measure your return on investment.

Ethical Marketing

Marketing has expanded far and wide in the past few years. The continued growth of social media marketing and rise in mobile marketing will see this trend increase rapidly in the coming months. The internet is often seen as a dark and scary place with tricksters, hackers, cheats and swindlers hiding behind each click. Therefore,  it’s more important than ever to be trustworthy. As a starting point, here are the Igneous Marketing seven rules for ethical marketing:

1. Tell the truth. Don’t write or say anything, anywhere, that isn’t true. True is not a relative term—it’s black and white. If it looks grayish, don’t say it.


2. Say it nicely. Don’t write or say anything, anywhere, that you’d be ashamed to see on a billboard or on the front page of the newspaper.


3. Give credit and say thank you. It’s so easy to get information and much of it is free. But if you use information from the Internet, credit the source. If possible, link to it.


4. Protect your customers. Never use a story about a client, even if you’ve removed the name, without asking for permission.


5. Treat your blog like journalism, not marketing. Pretend the editor at the The Times is going to fact-check you.


6. Use ghostwriters with integrity. If the ideas come from an expert, and a writer builds an article, blog post, newsletter, or seminar content from those ideas, it’s the expert’s work.


7. Respect your competitors. It’s just bad form to say negative things about competitors. Differentiating your company means saying positive things about yourself that are truthful, can be supported with evidence, and make a difference to clients. Don’t lie to get competitive intelligence. Instead, consider asking your clients who switched or employees who moved. Follow competitors on social media, and set up Google alerts.

Don’t be tarred with the same brush – make sure your website or social media presence is seen and trusted

Which marketing practices generate the most results

In my usual search for marketing news and insight, I stumbled across a report with some very interesting stats on business marketing practices. Here at, Igneous Marketing, we are often asked which of the millions of marketing practices, strategies and techniques give the best result and why. This is obviously impossible to answer in generalist terms but a report from MarketingSherpa seems to provide a few answers on this topic.

The report itself focuses on SEO but also offers some interesting insight into what other organisations (B2B) are using and what is bringing them success. According to MarketingSherpa, the top concerns of B2B Marketers revolve around getting more value and revenue out of limited resources – all in a fast paced world of increasing competition. Prioritizing resources for maximum impact is critical.

The graph below provides some interesting insight

The report also highlighted that obviously combinations work more effectively than single practices in isolation. The report also advocated regular activity, refinement and measurement.

Does this sound familiar? Have a look here!!