New free tool for gathering some quick market intel..

[Eskil]

Lots of research tools come and go, but the new FollowScout is kind of interesting. I thought to share it here for those who are looking into entering a market - to see what potential competitors are doing, where/how they are advertising, etc.

Like any such tool - some of the information will always be approximate and only your own market tests will give you real results. As a business or product owner, why would you want to do competitor marketing research in the first place? In any market with healthy competition - the top players are always going to keep an eye what "the others" are doing. It's just the nature of business. But in my view, this is actually just good for any market - especially for the end consumer. Intelligent-minded business owners aren't "spying" on each other just for the sake of copying and trying to drive each other away. No. The true value in competition research lies in learning from each other. There is always going to be that one demographic you hadn't that of, or that new keyword group defining a whole new market - that your marketing strategy never fully focused on. And the same goes for your competitors. You're most likely doing some stuff they hadn't thought of either.

But nonetheless, it's quick way to gather quite a bit of possibly useful information with just a couple of mouse-clicks.
FollowScout claims to be the fastest and most comprehensive all-in-one competitors research plugin out there, and after doing some testing with it - I feel they have deserved the rights to claim. The free tool installs as an addon to your browser (I use Chrome, and the installation was quick and painless). You can immediately begin to use it, and turn it on or off on the fly. In the words of the creators;

"FollowScout aggregates competitive data from multiple sources across several different channels and displays it in an easy to read format. You’ll immediately understand how any website acquires customers over search, display, affiliate, social, and several other online marketing channels. "​

So the tool is essentially an aggregator of research data collected from various other sources and tools - but presented in one, conveniently accessible (and fast) way. Once installed, go visit a site of a potential competitor, and start the tool by clicking its icon inside your browser bar. A right-hand sidebar will then pop out like this:

After just a few seconds, you can see all the various data pouring in - and it's time to take a look at the results. The data is gathered and merged from various sources, including:

• Compete
• Alexa
• Quantcast
• iSpionage
• WhatRunsWhere
• KeywordSpy
• AdBeat
• MixRank
• Twitter
• Google
• Bing

You could of course obtain all this information yourself, or even outsource it to your VA - but the whole point of a tool like this is convenience and quick access. You also don't have to visit the site directly to get the data. Simply type in the domain or any URL at the top of the FollowScout sidebar, and it will get to work right away. In addition to just showing you what other sites are up to - FollowScout also lets you "follow" those sites, so that you can get notified when something seems to have changed in their advertising strategy.

Here are some of the main sections of information you will get immediate access to from your sidebar:

 

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[stranger]

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