Trying to get these answers can be difficult and time consuming, requiring many different tools to aggregate results. That is, unless you have Rival IQ.

The Power of Competitive Intelligence

For the uninitiated, Rival IQ is a simple marketing analytics tool that analyzes the digital footprint of a company against its competitors. Data is collected from 6 social networks, company websites, and search terms (organic and paid) with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Within minutes, you can access a “landscape” that highlights your competitive social performance  via a rich web interface or Powerpoint export.

This post will use a sample collection of wineries, but it would work the same with your landscape.  Let’s uncork a bottle and get educated.

Q1: What search terms represent the best opportunity for additional traffic?

Regardless of your overall strategy, generating organic traffic from search is critical. Finding words with high search volume in areas you don’t currently rank gives you a chance to improve.

Check out this link to get results like this:

From this SEO break down, we can identify which keywords aren’t currently ranked, but would allow for quick and easy strategy improvement.  By combining good content with low cost advertising, you should be able to yield some solid benefit.

Q2: What social channels matter most to my customers?

It seems like a new social platform emerges and becomes all the craze each quarter, but which ones are your customers using? Are they on Twitter or Ello? Are they on Facebook or YouTube?

It is important to identify the networks on which your customer base is most present and engaged. This allows you to further target your marketing strategy and focus on the platforms that actually matter. Don’t spread yourself thin.

Just because a social network exists doesn’t mean you need to start posting content on it. Use this link to understand what channels matter, in terms of audience, activity and engagement.

For this landscape, Facebook and Twitter are clearly critical, but Instagram is gaining ground quickly, too. With this information, we can strategize which platforms to focus on, create both organic and paid campaigns, and set tangible goals for increased presence and engagement.

Q3: What social content resonates with my target audience?

What works is a relative term. This is why we believe it is best to look at content with a competitive lens. See which of your posts and your competitors’ posts are yielding high engagement. This way, you can analyze and assess the type of content your target audience is most responsive to.

Use this link to see how your social content compares and where it ranks in the top 50 posts for any given time period. Rival IQ “normalizes” for big and small followings by calculating an “engagement rate” (sum of likes, comments or shares/1000 page likes).

Here’s an example:

As you can see in the example above, the top four engaging posts have images. This is a trend we have seen across multiple platforms and landscapes.

Q4: Am I posting enough content on the right channels?

To be successful with social posts, both quality and quantity are important.

A great way to figure out how much you should post is by looking at others in your landscape. I also recommend looking at companies you aspire to be like to see what posting best practices they follow. By looking at the posting trends in your landscape, you can identify not only how much, but what times to post.

Use this link to see how often you should be posting.

Q5: Who are the top Twitter influencers in my landscape?

Almost every marketer should care about Twitter because many top industry influencers are active “tweeters.” By understanding who is influencing your market landscape on Twitter, you can identify which people you should try to build relationships with.

This link will tell you who is driving the conversation for your brand and your industry.

It is pretty clear who already has some strong brand affinity and where to send a few nice bottles!

Get More Out of Social Media Marketing

With these 5 links, you are now empowered to quickly and repeatedly answer some of your most critical marketing questions.

1. Top SEO Keywords: https://www.rivaliq.com/seo#tabs/landscape/details/8
2. Social Channel Overview: https://www.rivaliq.com/overview
3. Top Content: https://www.rivaliq.com/overview#facebook
4. Average Number of Posts/Day: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#category?ordinal=3&category=facebook
5. Top Twitter Influencers: https://www.rivaliq.com/mentions#tabs/mentioners

Time for that nice Cabernet!

The post 5 Critical Social Media Marketing Questions You Can Answer with Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

As part of this process, I show off our “Landscape Overview”, which includes the relative balance of fans across six top social networks. One thing that always surprises me, and most of our potential customers, is the significant number of brands with an active Google+ company page.

For example, check out this report for major car companies. Tons of red, right? The largest social audience after Facebook is Google+. Not Twitter, not Instagram, not YouTube, but Google+.

“Social Audience” is defined as the number of fans, followers, subscribers, etc.

Clearly, optimizing a Google company page is a critical part of these companies” digital strategy, but why? I didnt get it, and all I heard from marketers was how they disliked Google+. So, I started digging around to discover the answer.

6 Reasons to Maintain a Google+ Company Page

Reason #1: There is a Big, Growing and Engaged Audience on Google

In an article by Ishita Ganguly on Social Media Examiner (love those folks), I found some very interesting stats about the growing user base on Google :

• Google has 540 million monthly active users and 20 million unique mobile monthly users.
• Engagement on a Facebook post per user is .073% while it’s .069% on a Google plus post.
• Google mobile app user growth from December 13 to May 14 was 14%.

Reason #2: Show Up in Organic Search Results

There are direct benefits to using Google+, especially if you care about organic search traffic, and who doesn’t? As SEO expert Josh Patrice wrote in his post on 3 Reasons to Use Google+, Google loves Google, so high-quality Google post content can show up in organic search results. And, when people click on this content, Google will notice and your value will keep increasing. This increased organic search value is nearly impossible to get with other social networks, like Twitter or Facebook.

Here is an example from Ishita’s post:

Content Marketing Tip: Create content that is tailored to your audience and optimized for certain keywords or terms. This should be part of your content marketing and SEO strategy anyway. Showing up inline with other search results is just an added benefit.

Reason #3: Reserve Valuable Screen Space

Once you have a Google company page, if anyone with a Google account “Googles” your company”s name, an overview of your page will appear to the right of their search results. This prime spot of search page real estate gives you the opportunity to convey your brand message with compelling visuals and content.

Take a look at the example below. Note that the logo links directly to Starbucks” Google company page and recent Google posts are highlighted. This is valuable because it builds awareness of both your content and page, increasing the chances of gaining new followers and users discovering new content. It”s the wonderful “circle” of Google life!

 Reason #4: Social Proof

As you move from organic results to paid search, Google will display the number of ” 1″s” next to your paid ad.  Adding “social proof” is purported to increase click-through-rates. Is social proof actually valuable? Well, according to H&M, it acquired a 22% increase online casino in CTR due to social proof. Fortunately, having your social shares appear next to paid ads is fairly simple — just follow this guide by Google.

Reason #5: Google Treats Google Profiles Like Web Sites

Another factor in showing up well in organic search is page or domain authority.  This comes when other people link to your web site.  The more inbound links from high value people or pages, the higher your rank, influencing your domain authority. As stated in this post by Mark Traphagen on Maximize Social Business, “Google treats a Google company page and profile just like “regular” web sites when it comes to search. That only really hits home when you understand that Google profiles and pages have PageRank.”

Granted, a domain may have several ways of gaining external links, not just to Google+, but there is a clear direct correlation between engagement on Google posts and number of external links. Take a look at this custom Rival IQ chart for the Auto industry. Here, you can see a direct correlation between the number of Moz Links (sum of internal and external links) and Moz Domain Authority.  Thanks to our friends at Moz for access to lots of cool and valuable SEO related data!

So how does it all relate? Let me break it down for you: An increase in inbound links is directly correlated to better domain authority, which leads to higher placement in search results. Higher search result placement means more people will see your content, bringing in more organic traffic.

Google Continues to Spark Curiosity and Deliver Results

There may be even more benefits of a strong Google company page that involve influencers, communities and sharing of key content, so I am going to keep digging around on this topic.  And, it is highly likely that Google will continue to favor companies that invest time in creating good content and/or strong communities on Google+.  Makes sense, right?

Feel free to play with any of these Landscapes (Autos, Fashion and Airlines) and our powerful custom report builder to draw your own conclusions about the correlation between Google activity and other metrics. I now understand why some companies are motivated to invest time into Google+.

Finally, I should add that it”s important you set up your Google company page correctly. Many businesses make the mistake of creating a personal profile instead of a company page, and a profile does not include all the benefits I list above.

The post Why a Google+ Company Page is a Must for Your Business appeared first on Rival IQ.

Our process followed six key steps:

1. Developed a job description
2. Created a landing page using Unbounce
3. Promoted the role via multiple channels
4. Used a Google Form to gather candidate info
5. Included the broader team in final interviews
6. Used a decision matrix to make our final decision

 Below is more detail on each of the steps in the process.

1. Write a job description that includes your personality

First, we wrote a job description. Pretty standard, but we tried to add a bit more personality and creativity to the description. We included a sense of the company, our culture, the role, and some background on the product (a link to a product video and sample market landscape). With this detail, the page could stand alone, which was important as we expected it to be shared.

Here’s some of the job description to give you an idea:

2. Create a landing page to collect responses

Next, we created a landing page using Unbounce, which allowed us design freedom and the ability to include a real “call to action”. Also by using a landing page, we could easily track visitors and conversion. We actually created 2 variants (A/B testing with different headlines), since Unbounce makes this easy, and we wanted to test a few versions – like a good marketer should. In the end, both performed about the same in terms of conversion, but seeing the results was useful.

3. Promote everywhere you can

With the pages posted, we leveraged our social networks and direct connections (e.g. friends, customers, investors, marketing influences, etc.) to drive awareness. We also sent specific people we met in the physical world to this page, putting everyone through the same process. We posted the page on April 30, and over the next 3 weeks, about 950 people viewed the page, resulting in 17 direct applications. We had about another five people that applied via word of mouth or other connections. With about 22 candidates, we triaged the list, narrowing it down to about 10 initially that we thought had the right skills or background.

4. Gather more data via a Google Form

We knew the areas we really cared about for this role, and we wanted to learn more from each candidate across these criteria.  We made a Google Form and asked each candidate to fill it out. This included everything from “scoring” themselves on various skills to providing sample content.

Here’s the form if you’d like to make a copy and use yourself: Candidate Scoring Form

Many of the candidates said this approach felt innovative and was a good way to help them understand us better, while giving us concrete data about their backgrounds. Using this form also helped us more efficiently compare the candidates, as well as make sure we were comparing them across consistent benchmarks. With this data, we narrowed the field down to seven people who I interviewed personally, maintaining detailed notes in a Google Doc to be shared later. After these meetings, I narrowed the field to four candidates.

5. Get the rest of the team engaged

With our top four candidates, I could now efficiently include the larger group, using my notes and the survey responses as background for my decision making. In our case, the extended group included the three other founders and one of our investors, content marketing genius, Jay Baer. We focused on having all four candidates interview with the team over a short period of time, so candidate comparison was fresh in everyone’s mind.

While the founders had perspectives on how and who we wanted to work with, it was Jay’s expertise that helped frame our decision on the strongest marketing leader for the company and who best represented our target customer.

6. Use a final decision matrix

In the end, we were left with two excellent candidates, each with a unique but very different blend of strategic and tactical experiences. We created a small rubric and scored each from 1 to 10 on the following attributes:

• Acquisition focus
• Content creation
• Tools and tech
• Branding and positioning
• Resume (for future/external)
• Professional network
• Personal brand/following
• Team fit 

In addition, we knew we needed someone who really represented our customer and who would push us hard to create a truly great product for active online marketers and marketing leaders.

It was a difficult decision, and in the end, we selected someone who brought a combination of startup and enterprise expertise, big data instincts, recent cloud momentum, and deep industry connections, which takes time to develop.

So, we welcome Margaret Dawson as our new CMO and, as one of our founders said it best, our “kick ass marketer”!

The post Our Six Step Process to Hiring a “Kick Ass Marketer” at Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

The Rival IQ team received some pretty exciting news this week – we were chosen as Gartner’s Cool Vendor for Social Marketing! This excerpt from the full report covers why Rival IQ is useful and who would benefit from a subscription. If what you read sparks your interest, we have a 14-day free trial!

Download the full report here  Gartner 2014 Cool Vendors in Social Marketing

Excerpt republished from full report by Jennifer Polk, Gartner Analyst

Brands in the social space can win only by playing their own game well, but they can find “greenfield” opportunities or distinguish themselves by knowing what grounds competitors occupy. Rival IQ is a software-as-a-service company that provides competitive marketing intelligence, including social analytics, and offers organizations a quick, cost-effective way to generate insights that can help them stay up to speed on their opponents.

Why Cool: Rival IQ offers easy-to-obtain, cost-effective data on key competitors’ activities across the Web, search and social media channels. Within Rival IQ, marketers can select a set of competitors, monitor competitors’ posts, track changes in messaging, view a dashboard or receive notifications of breakout campaigns and content published by their rivals. This data can enable marketers to generate insights that can help justify spend based on competitors’ performance, benchmark their programs against those of other brands and learn about the programs other companies are executing across channels. What makes Rival IQ cool is it is always adding new companies to its competitor landscapes and conducting ongoing monitoring, to provide its clients with readily available and up-to-date competitive intelligence. Getting this intelligence through Rival IQ offers a more consistent and cost- effective approach than engaging agencies for periodic creative and message tracking, or tying up internal business or marketing analysts to manually track what the competition is doing and what’s working. Ease of setup and ongoing access to the data mean insights can be quickly generated, updated and incorporated into social marketing strategy.

Who Should Care: Companies that are interested in gaining competitive marketing intelligence or a view of how their digital marketing efforts compare with those of competitors, as well as agencies that use junior talent to manually audit competitors and compile and analyze similar data, should examine how Rival IQ can support more-efficient and cost-effective analysis for business development and idea generation. Marketers relying on agencies for this type of intelligence should consider Rival IQ to enable competitive monitoring in-house, to maintain a perspective on how others are using the Web, search and social media channels.

— by Jennifer Polk (Gartner Analyst), May 2014

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications,and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Rival IQ named Gartner Cool Vendor for Social Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.

Luke Blaser is one of the founders of Inkwell Media, an up-and-coming content marketing agency with some cool clients that include photographer Chase Jarvis and the world’s most influential snowboarder, Travis Rice.

Like many agencies, Inkwell spends a large amount of time meeting with companies to showcase the value they bring with detailed social media metrics.

Before meeting with a new company, Luke builds a “landscape” in Rival IQ that includes the company and a few of its close competitors. Rival IQ automatically assembles all the stats, positioning and top social content for the landscape. This provides Luke with quantitative data that he’ll use in framing the presentation, demonstrating the company’s position against competitors on many fronts. This ongoing data reporting also leads to the solutions Inkwell offers to the brand.

It’s a straightforward process that’s key to how Inkwell approaches both new and existing partners. The competitive landscape provides deep, contextual data on how Inkwell’s clients are really doing, a level of information that always resonates with clients.

One of the biggest challenges Inkwell has is finding time to convert the standard PowerPoint reports with Rival IQ branding into a presentation with Inkwell branding. Adding their own logo, color scheme and basic branding elements is a repetitive, time-consuming process.

So with Luke’s help, we developed a simple way to create a “custom theme” for all our export formats (Powerpoint, PDF and PNG).  It’s simple to upload a logo, select a few colors and have a custom theme.  Baam!  Now, whether you are doing a full competitive analysis or just a social media audit, you can select the custom theme for a full report or a single view.  Here’s the app with a custom theme for Inkwell.

And here’s an example of a full themed Rival IQ report including channel analysis, social analytics and top content, created in minutes.  Wouldn’t you want this for every client presentation or your weekly metrics meeting?

[slideshare id=33926135&doc=landscapeoverviewdrinksandbeverages20140326-20140424-140424223949-phpapp02]

Inkwell is a leader in content marketing and relies on Rival IQ to provide the data they need to make smart decisions for their clients.  Luke knows his way around our service and many other social media tools available in the market today. He offered up a few tips in using Rival IQ to drive value for your clients.

– Use Rival IQ weekly “social content update” emails to keep key issues like growth, progress, competition and trends top-of-mind. Share the stats or emails selectively with your clients so they know what is working well. (sample email content from our friends @redbull who are crushing it)

– Consider building additional “landscapes” that include brands that excel at marketing to your target audience, but are not necessarily direct competitors.  Learn what kinds of content works, how much they focus on one channel vs. another and the make-up of their content (e.g. photos vs. links, posting days…).  

 – When considering other tools that measure social reach and engagement, think hard about price/value and how that might change as you scale up to bigger clients, more channels and more followers.  It can get expensive!

We’re excited to have people like Luke and the team at Inkwell using our product and pushing us to make it better.  And, excited to have features like the custom themes ready in our ongoing pursuit of helping marketers save time, know more and be excellent

The post Inkwell Media Helps Influential Clients Become More Influential With New “Custom PowerPoint Themes” appeared first on Rival IQ.

The newly released Top Content Summary within Rival IQ now removes some of the guesswork by deeply analyzing your competitors’ content. This new feature includes the ability to analyze top posts across several major social networks and determine at a very detailed level what is working best. Social media competitive analysis should be part of your daily marketing workflow to get ahead!

Analyzing Top Social Content

Rival IQ now analyzes the top 50 posts for any given time period (7, 14, 30 or 90 days), and shows who really has the share of voice. Obviously, our glorious Seahawks should be at the top of the pack with our Super Bowl win, but it’s interesting to see the Bills and the Panthers are getting some attention as well.

Rival IQ now analyzes the top 50 post for any given time period (7, 14, 30 or 90 days), and shows who really has the share of voice.

If you want to see some of the wild Facebook action, make a copy of our “NFL landscape” and explore it within Rival IQ on your own.

Tweets can be analyzed in a similar way. One of our landscapes is the Kapost top 50 content marketers. It’s great to see our friends @redbull kicking it hard in support of the Olympics. Not only can we see that they have a massive share of voice, but we can also see what kinds of Tweets (photos) and what days of the week (Friday) are the most successful.

Easily view Top Tweets by Company, Top Tweets by Time, and Top Tweets by Type to see which companies in your landscape are on top of their Twitter game.

Most Engaging Content

As always, Rival IQ shows you the top content in more detail, ranked by engagement rate, engagement total, or even sub-metrics like favorites or re-tweets. A pretty handy feature when you want to get inspired by new ideas for content.

View top content in more detail, ranked by engagement rate, engagement total, or even sub-metrics like favorites or re-tweets.

Sure, you can chart your own course, but wouldn’t you want to learn from the best? Check out any of these leading landscapes or create your own to see how you and your competitors rank and what types and times are best to post.

Kapost Top 50 Content Marketers

NFL Teams – #gohawks

NBA Teams – With football over, we need to track something new

Major Las Vegas hotels – 100% of the top Facebook posts have photos

Want to try this out for yourself in Rival IQ? Sign up and try it free for 14 days!

The post Rival IQ Top Social Content for Competitive Analysis appeared first on Rival IQ.

We live in a fast world. What worked last month may not work so well today. This applies to starting companies, raising money, building software, and marketing your product or service. If you need more proof check out this timeline from Hootsuite, or the latest posts about changes to Google and Facebook. All of this evidence points to one fact: In order to stay relevant, you must always be learning.

My daughter goes to the Northwest school in Seattle. They focus on a broad curriculum and strive to develop kids with a global perspective. But above all else, they encourage a passion for lifelong learning.  Even the nature of education is changing with companies like Creative Live, Everpath (I am an investor in both), and Code Academy. These companies give people the ability to learn new skills, in an on-demand way, at a rapid pace, and by learning from the best. This is an important trend, especially when it comes to “online” skills which are changing at disproportionately fast rate.

I start companies and advise others because I think it’s the fastest and best way to learn things. When you surround yourself with people who want a problem solved badly (great early customers), and people who can attempt solutions (great startup people and developers), you create a virtuous cycle of discovery, evaluation, and learning. This process is exciting and fun. Granted, it is way more fun when it works and you can actually solve a problem – but even the struggle is valuable and instructive.

I also tend to learn from my community of entrepreneurs. This means spending time at Techstars, Startup Weekend, or Geekwire events, where the richness of the community and diversity of perspective and ideas move at a very rapid pace. Learning from VC’s has been especially valuable, since they have a very broad perspective and are first to hear about the next generation of ideas. With many VC’s creating great content (like Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, Tomaz Tunguz, Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen), the resources for learning are endless.

I also learn a ton from the team here at Rival IQ, where we are pushing the bounds of data, content marketing, and marketing intelligence. Spending my time building and advising also helps me test approaches and learn what resonates.

At Rival IQ, we have a deep passion for learning. Hell, the whole application is about learning what is working for your competitors or companies you admire. We are on a quest to learn what works across the whole spectrum of online marketing. What are the right channels? What are the best practices? Do you need to be first to a new channel or just be a fast-follower? How do different channels work for different products and customers? The answer lies in the data, in the patterns, and in the comparisons. We are going to find these answers!

We have a team and a culture for continuous learning. How should we build the product (we keep modifying our own process) and the company? What platforms should we use (Heroku, Node, AWS), and what products should we use to engage our customers (Intercom, Stripe, Full Contact, YesWare)? We further this learning with the use of sites like Best Vendor to find and evaluate even more.

I contend that everyone’s world is changing more rapidly than they perceive – and if you are not constantly looking at what you need to learn, you will be left behind, or at least be less effective. The tools are out there to discover, try, refine, and modify your approach. Everyone has a community of people who are also discovering new solutions to common problems.

What do you want to learn next? Where will you find the answers or the people attempting to solve the problems?

The post ABL – Always Be Learning appeared first on Rival IQ.