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5 Real-Time Online Marketing Tools To Give You The Edge

As markets become increasingly saturated and margins become increasingly thin, it’s getting more and more important to seize every possible business opportunity given to you – This is where real-time comes in. Acting instantaneously on each of your opportunities will often give you the upper hand, likewise it will allow you to practice damage limitation when something doesn’t quite go your way. So, without further a do, here are 5 Real-Time Online Marketing Tools You Give You The Edge:

Woopra

Woopra describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application”, and in some ways it’s hard to argue with that statement. Woopra boasts live tracking, statistics and analytics across multiple blogs & websites, all presented within a very tidy user interface. But alas, even though these features are nothing short of amazing, none of them are my favourite – It’s all about the real-time chat.

Personally, I’ve always been a fan of real-time chat on websites – It’s an excellent opportunity to gain feedback, increase awareness, and in some cases, make a sale. You really can’t underestimate the value of real-time customer engagement – Even in this digital age. Woopra’s chat feature boasts a number of features; both “proactive” and “reactive” functionality is available – “Proactive” being where a “webmaster” (Hello 1999) can initiate a chat session with anybody on the website, and “reactive” being an embeddable ‘click to chat’ style widget you can place on your site. Oh, and no client-side software necessary, too.

Woopra

Woopra Gives You Comprehensive Stats & a Lot More

Backtype

Backtype is an excellent tool which is used to analyze URLs in real-time, but it isn’t just your regular link analysis tool – Backtype will give you a breakdown of the URL’s impact on all the big social media platforms, as well as a large amount of data on the specific users participating and conversations occurring. All this stuff is really useful.  For example, if you were to launch a social campaign on your latest blog post and wanted to measure its impact vs a previous post (oh, and did I mention you can compare URLs, too?), you can see on which networks that particular niche/subject excels and react accordingly.

BackType Allows you to Monitor & Analyze URL’s Based on their Social Popularity

Tweetdeck

As highlighted above, customer engagement is key – You need to be able to capitalize on every lead you have in your market, and if you’re not monitoring your social networking accounts in real-time, you risk losing a potential customer. For this reason, software such as (but not limited to) Tweetdeck is a necessity. Tweetdeck allows you to hook into all the top social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Foursquare, and will let you to set up a number of different filters and notifications (e.g. username mentions, location specific checkins & query search) so that you don’t miss a thing.

tweetdeck

Tweetdeck Will Let You Engage With Your Customers on a Host of Different Platforms

Twitter Search

If you want to develop high traffic content, it’s imperative that the topic is hot, and what better place is there to measure a topic’s popularity than Twitter’s trending topics? That’s not all that Twitter’s search offers though – The advanced search offers a tonne of functionality from the usual hash tag, username & phrase search, all the way to an attitude (where you can search for tweets in both a happy and sad mood), location & language search.

There’s functionality for the search geeks, too – You have access to all your favourite queries such as exact, OR and negative keywords, as well as some fresh stuff like To:/From:, filter: (filter tweets by their content e.g. ‘filter:links’) & source: (filter tweets by their source e.g. ‘filter:tweetdeck’).

Twitter Search

Twitter Search Should Be Your One-Stop-Shop For Monitoring Online Trends

Pingdom

When you’re running a large amount of campaigns for different sites simultaneously it’s very difficult to regularly check each of your sites for technical issues. This means that if one of your sites is unfortunate enough to go down, you’re essentially burning money. Simply, Pingdom will tell you when your website is down in real-time (whether it be by Twitter, text or email is up to you), and will give you an analysis of what went wrong so you can go and whine to your pesky hosting company.

pingdom

Pingdom Will Notify You If Your Website is Having Technical Issues

Do you have any more essential Online Marketing tools that you use? Post them in the comments below!

About Tom Layfield

Co-Founder & Digital Strategist at Acquisition Engine, passionate about all things web - especially marketing & startups.
  • Jamie

    Nice read… I haven't used Woopra before so will give that a go.

  • http://directorysieve.com/ Uttoran Sen

    nice list of tools, nice to see the mention of back type, it is one of my favorite tool, really helps to get all the comments and talking to the central place. twitter search and tweetdeck are very common and regularly used, however will try Woopra soon, looks good.

  • http://twitter.com/heardable Porsche Nguyen

    Tom-

    Nice list. You might want to consider adding another online marketing tool to your esteemed list – Heardable. I work for Heardable, so yes, I am tooting our horn but hopefully in a constructive way.

    Heardable allows business operators and brand owners to understand how well their brands are performing online, relative to their competition. We start by scanning a brand's URL and issuing a Heardable Score, an easy-to-understand rating that ranks how a brand is performing online on a scale of 0 – 1,000. The higher the score, the better you're doing. It's like a FICO score for brands.

    Heardable's unique ABLE engine analyzes 438 separate data points for each brand and its competitors, in real time, isolating those areas in which the business operator has an advantage over its competition, and which areas it needs to improve. Heardable provides insights into:

    1. Social media participation
    2. SEO best practices
    3. Measurement & tracking capabilities
    4. Syndicated & user generated content publishing
    5. Mobile browser compatibility
    6. Actionable design

    Here is a link to the brand profile for acquisitionengine.com – http://tinyurl.com/2bf2duj

    And here is a link to the 100 most effective brands online: http://heardable.com/heardable_lists.php

    Enjoy!

    -Porsche

  • http://www.gudipudi.com Gudipudi

    thanks for sharing the resources …bt how reliable is pingdom

  • http://twitter.com/SeanMcColgan Sean McColgan

    Hey Gudipudi – Pingdom is super reliable.

    When this sites landing page was taken down and we transferred over our WordPress install – it alerted us via email of the downtime. We were down for literally 5 minutes…

    Have used it on clients sites before when running large Adwords campaigns and it has saved us many a time from losing non-performing ad spend due to the site being down.

    You can read about how their system works in more detail here – http://goo.gl/99XJ

  • http://twitter.com/SeanMcColgan Sean McColgan

    Hey Gudipudi – Pingdom is super reliable.

    When this sites landing page was taken down and we transferred over our WordPress install – it alerted us via email of the downtime. We were down for literally 5 minutes…

    Have used it on clients sites before when running large Adwords campaigns and it has saved us many a time from losing non-performing ad spend due to the site being down.

    You can read about how their system works in more detail here – http://goo.gl/99XJ

  • http://www.acquisitionengine.com Tom Layfield

    Hi Porsche,

    Had a look at your web app – Looks really nice. There's quite a few elements on the scoring list that we plan to implement on this site; I'm looking forward to checking it out again when we've made those :)

    Tom

  • http://www.gudipudi.com Gudipudi

    Thankyou Sean for the reply…Let me look into it in more detail.

  • bryanps

    Hey tom nice list there. I'd like to recommend another very useful tool. Its call Friendfeed, not sure if you've heard of it but its basically a feeder for all things social, Facebook, Disqus, Tumblr, Twitter, Google Reader and even your blog RSS feed. Its like an aggregator for all sorts of feeds from all sort of account that you have (or already have). Having said that not sure if you are a fan of feeds, but just something to add on to your post too.

    Cheers!

  • http://www.acquisitionengine.com Tom Layfield

    Hi Bryan,

    I'm a big fan of Feeds and long time fan of FriendFeed, although since Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed I'm wary of relying on them in the longterm for lifestreaming, mashing up our RSS Feeds.

    Be interesting to see if Google Buzz can pick up where FriendFeed left off.

    Tom

  • http://twitter.com/seanrape Sergio Ramirez

    Nice list

  • http://www.linkbuildr.com/ Linkbuildr

    Really liked that look of heardable! We’re shopping around for something like this for a client so I think we have a winner!

  • Anonymous

    I think when talking Inside Sales you have to put front and center, B2B Lead Generation (Tom Nice blog spot here by the way)

    I don’t know if the rest of you agree but, the obvious difference between a B2B Lead Generation program and a B2B Appointment Setting campaign is that a B2B Lead Generation program stops one step short of setting a qualified appointment. Some clients, involved in a complex sale that requires a vast knowledge of the industry or strong knowledge capital, prefer us to qualify the lead and then hand it over to the client to have an in-depth business discussion and qualify the lead more thoroughly before they actually set a qualified appointment.

    Honestly, every post that you see on the web describes the next BIG methodology when it comes to B2B Lead Generation. At my company Partner Source, which is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we approach the B2B Lead Generation subject with science, as it is our business. We have taken over 20 years of B2B Lead Generation historical data and the proof is in the pudding, you can’t argue the results.

    Here is what we offer, what do you think about this position?

    * Decision Maker appointments
    * You receive every email and communication with prospects (audio recordings)
    * (No Shows for you = 0%)
    * We have lists of over 25,000 potential prospects in the U.S.
    * We can use your CRM list if requested
    * Unlike most Lead Gen firms, you can directly call our Bus. Dev. people anytime
    * Your account status is done DAILY by Phone not email like our competition
    * Fast turnaround of your project
    * Cost savings and revenue increase
    * Significant improvement in the quality and productivity of your business
    * B2B Lead Generation Companies
    * RESULTS

    Glenn Wright
    Partner Source (B2B Lead Generation)
    Minneapolis, Minnesota
    http://www.thepartnersource.com

  • Anonymous

    This is really good article for online marketing. And some of the tools are also useful in real marketing and appointment with customers. Convince the customer for the appointment is not easy task.

  • http://www.appointmentsetting.com/ appointment setting

    Couldn’t agree more. This are really great tools for marketing. And provide live data which is really good for any admin.