Owning a Tourism Business is awesome

22 Jun 2008

Destinations and the Benefits of Blogging

Blogs, UGC, organic search… it’s getting harder for the destination professional to keep up-to-date with the latest terminology, and harder still to ensure that their online marketing activities fully embrace these new approaches. But experts are warning that destinations which fail to adapt could face disaster.

User-generated content, or UGC, is widely considered to be more persuasive than advertising, yet many destinations have been slow to recognise the benefits, preferring instead to maintain a tight control over their marketing message. But with the growing number of C2C sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Tagzania, Gusto, Wikia, and RealTravel, it is fast becoming impossible to ignore UGC.

Analysts cite blogs, social networking sites and natural search engine optimisation as massive opportunities for the travel industry, with some going as far to suggest that they should form part of every organisation’s online marketing strategy.

A spokesman for the Internet Advertising Bureau, the UK trade association for the internet marketing industry, commented: ‘With such a choice of media at their finger-tips, marketers and brand managers have never had it better, but neither has it been more of a challenge to keep up with consumers.

‘As consumers are increasingly empowered to take control of brands online through a variety of social media such as user-generated content and blogs, brand managers must ‘unthink’ much of the traditional approach to brand management and learn how to use these forms of social media to liberate their brand communications.’

Traffic to blogs (web logs) has grown by more than 50% over the last year to nearly 60 million visitors, representing 34% of all internet users, according to the comScore Media Metrix. In addition, the research reveals that blogs are more likely to attract younger visitors from higher incomes homes, who will visit nearly twice as many web pages as the internet average and are much more likely to shop online.

Yeoh Siew Hoon, co-organiser of the Wired Travel Asia annual conference, commented recently on the growing power of social networking sites and the suggestion that travel writers and agents face an imminent demise: ‘Their argument is that, because of the power of social networking sites where everyone is now a journalist, writer, commentator, opinion-maker i.e. blogger, who needs travel writers to tell us where to go and what to see and travel agents to recommend places to stay?’

One recent blog success story is comes from Canada’s Bay of Fundy Tourism Partnership. Within just a few weeks of its launch, the blog was receiving several hundreds of visitors per week. Members of the Bay of Fundy Tourism Partnership throughout New Brunswick and Nova Scotia contribute regularly to the blog.

Partnership manager and committed blogger, Terri McCulloch, commented: ‘Our blog provides us with an emerging opportunity to share real time news, recipes, photos, videos, poetry and stories about the place that we enjoy inviting visitors to explore with us.’

But it’s not just the tourists that can benefit from blogging. A new tourism marketing blog, designed to support the industy by providing marketing tips, book reviews, market research and information on industry trends, has been developed by AudioConexus, an audio tour and marketing services company.


Tourism Internet Marketing

21 Jun 2008

How to I check my online reputation?

How do you check what is being said about you online?
  1. Simply Google your business name to start with. Have a look through the first few pages of Google and see what has come up. You are meant to find something you did not know about!
  2. Go to this page on TripAdvisor and put in your business name or part of it in the top left search box. Go go go, do it now!!! Also try your competitors!!!
  3. While catching up on my RSS feeds from my favourite online marketing for tourism blogs, I discovered a little gem: Todd Lucier from TourismKeys.ca mentioned www.twing.com which is a search engine that crawls online forums - you know, forums, these online bars how I like to call them, where you can ask a question and expect a lot of useful answers. I have checked what people are asking about my local tourism region, Australia’s Gold Coast, and its rather amazing! There are people asking about where to stay, if such and such property is friendly and other recommending other properties that they have already stayed at… Talk about free marketing!
  4. If you are even more game you could start checking if someone posted some photos of their holiday at your place on Flickr… If not, why don’t you start?

20 Jun 2008

My SEO tip by Suresh Babu

by Suresh Babu

1. If you are targeting different countries. Register a Local domain, If you are targeting UK. Register a .co.uk Domain, have someone who is in that Country to Contribute. Ask them to give review on Local Hotel etc from the same Country. Or with a little bit of creativity you can have anyone from anywhere contribute to a blog or site. Include keywords in that content. (I am not suggesting to Stuff keyword) but keyword that makes sense to the User. And also find a host in that country and Host your site or Blog there. Why? Search Engines give preference to local.

2. Personalized Search Results will be given preference, So concentrate on giving Personalized Search and optimizing your Images, Videos, Press Releases, Blogs, your Podcast Feeds, Tags etc

For more Internet Marketing, SEO Tips Visit: http://searchenginedetails.com Feel free to Comment and if you like the Content, Your Link would be greatly appriecated :)


Tourism Internet Marketing

19 Jun 2008

What is your ROI on Internet Marketing?

One of my favorite blogs...

Stuart

==================
Posted in tourism marketing on June 10th, 2008

I sometimes get frustrated when I see how people in tourism invest their hard-earned marketing dollars. It’s not that I think they are wasting their money. It’s that most people have no idea whether they are wasting their marketing dollars on their Internet Marketing strategy or not.

How to know if your Internet Marketing Strategy is working?

Answer the 3 questions below with no more than 6 small easy to understand words. . .

  1. Clearly describe what matters. What are your marketing objectives?
  2. How can you easily measure what matters?
  3. Describe one other thing you can easily measure?

Once you have the answers to these questions, put in practice a system to measure what matters.

Set a time frame for analyzing the results.

Plan future marketing efforts based on the results.

HINT: The reason for measuring things is to learn what works and what doesn’t work with your Internet Marketing practices. So plan on doing things a bit differently once you get the results.

Whether you represent a region, a tourism association, or a business, measuring the impact of your Internet Marketing will help you understand your ROI and report results to other members of your group or your team.



Internet Marketing for Tourism

18 Jun 2008

Interview with the Founder of TripAdvisor Stephen Kaufer

TripadvisorAt the recent PhocusWright Conference in Orlando, Florida, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Stephen Kaufer, Founder, President & CEO of Travel User Generated Content leader and pioneer TripAdvisor.com.

In his presentation at the PhocusWright (picture shows Stephen Kaufer presenting in the background, and myself together with Philip Wolf in the foreground), Stephen was talking about the importance of trust in the travel research and buying process. In order to get trust (the gold dust of the Internet), a site need “honest brokers” (people that give trust), and a “social network” (the group that you can trust). He also emphasized the importance of transparency, and that the monitoring of negative hotel reviews would hurt the integrity of the site, but also would diminish the value of all the real true brand ambassadors. Monitoring is a natural process that happens as part of the online community.

Enjoy the 10 minute interview (please excuse the wind noise), where Stephen addresses the growth of Tripadvisor, what is next with the company, his personal aspirations, as well as his views on sites like Facebook and integrating applications.


Tourism Internet Marketing

Free Y! IndexTools

IndexTools, a web analytics tools that claims to offer 80% of the functionality of omniture, was acquired by Yahoo in April.

Within few days after the acquisition, Yahoo announced that it will be giving away the tool for free. Well another few months flew by but there were still no sign of Free IndexTools.


Well, last week Yahoo announced that IndexTools is available for free but it is not freely available yet. At this time, all the new account activations will have to go through existing IndexTools partners. IndexTools is limiting new accounts to ensure they have proper infrastructure and capacity to handle new accounts.

In a letter to their partners, IndexTools wrote:

We here at IndexTools are now pleased to announce that the Add New Account function has been reactivated on your partner account, but with some limitations.

Please bear in mind that our current server capacity was based on our original projections according to where
IndexTools expected to be in 2008 in regards to volume and revenue. The acquisition by Yahoo! rendered this forecast obsolete. Our number one responsibility is to ensure that our existing partners and clients are not negatively impacted by an oversubscription of accounts on the IndexTools system. These limitations will be reviewed in the coming months.
So, what are these limitations?
  • You will be limited to three projects per client account"should you require more than three please contact your account manager

  • We are limiting the monthly page volume to 20 million page views/month for the immediate future (this limit is per client account); data collection will occur up to that 20 million page view mark, but not beyond

  • You will be able to add 5 accounts within a 30-day period ( based on former invoicing period)

  • Note: all new accounts will be created as Enterprise accounts from this day forward"furthermore, as there are no longer fees there is no longer any need for trial accounts

17 Jun 2008

Backpacking: the new luxury way to travel

By Fabienne Rabbiosi, Chief Executive Optimiser @ Untanglemyweb.com and Outdoors Sports Junkie

I spend most of last week travelling around the Whitsunday islands in Queensland, Australia. My incredible husband surprised me with organising it all. All I was given is a list of items to bring. I did not know where we were going, did not even know we had to catch a plane. Now just imagine how scary that is to the tourism professional that I am.

We stayed in Airlie beach, at one of the largest backpackers called Magnum. Backpacking in Australia is not what it used to be in my young (!) days. No more searching for staff member that has gone surfing when you arrive. You are now welcomed almost 24×7 by name-tagged staff in a larger than life reception with the latest computers, broadband and booking systems. They even wear staff uniforms. If you are lucky you will even be given a swipe (yes swipe) card to open your room. Backpacking is an industry. The biggest by far in Airlie Beach. Hostels owners make a mint trust me. When I asked for “industry rate” I was told “we don’t do such thing, we are just a backpackers and you would understand that we cannot afford to offer discounts”. Just a backpackers….Basic service: shared bathroom, no duvet but just one sheet, not much cleaning requirements and all that @ 60 dollars a night for a double room. Time it by approximately 100 and you start getting the picture!

On top of that, backpackers act as booking agents for tours. Another very good income trust me! Especially when a daytour costs minimum $100… Talking about daytours, this is me in a helicopter being whisked off to Whiteheaven beach on a surprise picnic trip…

Whiteheaven Beach

Another thing is the food. Backpackers used to rhyme with cheap feeds. Now, a plate of pasta will set you back minimum $15… The best I have seen is packets of cereals being itemised in small transparent plastic containers where a few of your favourite corn flakes will cost you $3 dollars… Clever isn’t it? Just add the milk (another dollar? that’s unless you are the “organic” backpacker and want soy… thats another $2 thank you very much!)

These guys have understood it all. Online marketing is key in the backpacking industry as their target market (the average backpacker, between 16 and 40+) is, just like me, an Internet baby.

How is your business telling all these rich backpackers what’s on offer behind your door?


E-tourism

Upgrade to Blended Content

Great little article at EzineArticles.com by Anuj Pathania about not just being happy with text no more. I am right in the middle of blending content on all my websites right now. Easier than i though actually!

"Blended content is a recently coined term in web terminology, and is widely being discussed ever since. Blended content refers to the today's generation content, generated from combination of several multimedia elements available together into one cohesive unit.

Web has evolved into something much more complex, than what it initially was during the time of its conception. World Wide Web has made many fold progress in its underling technology and overcome many constraints such as bandwidth and storage. In its nascent stages it was used to work only for data in form of text with low quality images sprinkled between them, and it made sense considering the very limited processing and networking resources available that time. But now, no such limitation exists and along with increase in technology capacities, there is a similar increase in the expectation of the users which now surf the web.

Today's user are no longer satisfied with mere text, they want a rich user experience using blended content. Blended content includes a large variety of objects such as text, along with images, video, audio, flash, feeds, widgets,etc blended together with each other. List of interactive component which can be embedded into normal content to convert it into blended content is increasing every day, with new stuff rolling out every other day.

Webmasters need to appreciate and understand this fact, and accordingly create new blended content and also upgrade their previous work into this format. Webmasters who fail to adapt to this every changing world will sooner or later perish."

Upgrade to Blended Content

16 Jun 2008

Promote your tourism business on TripAdvisor

In Australia and USA, TripAdvisor is possibly the best known online reputation checker. For those who do not know, TripAdvisor is an Internet site that allows anyone to comment about their experience at any tourism/hospitality related business.

I am asked every other day for a step by step guide to TripAdvisor. As I did not seem to find a 101 Guide to TripAdvisor guide for tourism business owners, I thought I would fill the information gap!

beach huts

image credit Steve Crane

Every established web surfers will check what is being said on TripAdvisor about the property he is about to book. Some even first start their search on the TripAdvisor site. What is fantastic (for those businesses who have a reputation management strategy in place) is that it can work as your best ally in terms of promoting your business. TripAdvisor has got such a strong online presence that your property’s page on the site will appear on the first pages of Google when your business name is keyed in the search field. Even before your own website sometimes (yep!)

TripAdvisor negative reviews : why you should be aware

abandonned hotel room

image credit this is your brain on lithium

TripAdvisor can also kill your best marketing efforts - that is, if you have not yet tackled the challenge of online marketing or have chosen to stay “passive”. Why? Well, because anyone can say anything about anyone (aka: YOU) on the Internet (this is formally known as User Generated Content). Let me give you an example:

I was conducting an online marketing training session the other day with tourism operators. Part of the workshop included the review of what potential guests might have said about their experience at your (accommodation) property on www.TripAdvisor.com. You should have seen the facial expression of a member of the audience, aka the accommodation property owner, when she realised that a past client has written an extremely negative review about her business.

If you are a tourism business for instance and decided to stay passive and not tackle the online world just yet, you are not simply staying in passive mode but doing your business some damage. People are most probably writing about you somewhere on the net. If not on TripAdvisor, probably somewhere else.

How can I take advantage of TripAdvisor to promote my business?

  1. First of all, you need to get listed on TripAdvisor. You can get listed as an accommodation provider, an attraction, a restaurant or a resource such as transport provider, information centre. You will be able to write a short review about your property, add a photo as well. Now, you have done the easiest bit. (if this is too complicated or you are starting to pull your hair out, drop me a line I just love to do all this stuff!). But how to get client reviews??
  2. How about about you ask each and every one of your client to visit TripAdvisor (make it easy for them, send them an email with the link to your property - just my 5 cents). If they have had a great experience, I am certain that they will be willing to help you out with your strategy a little. They can even upload their photos you know. If you would like more insight about this, contact me and I will give you a great little story!
  3. Next thing you can do is pull the testimonials of TripAdvisor straight into the homepage of your website so that any potential client can read about how much fun past clients had at your proterty! This is done using RSS feeds. This is how you add your trip advisor reviews to your website.

What will I do if someone writes a negative review on TripAdisor about my property?

  1. DO NOT STAY PASSIVE! Act! Respond to people’s reviews, and say your side of the story, and what you tried to do to fix the problem.
  2. You can also contact the unsatisfied client and offer them a free night at your property for instance. The end goal is for other TripAdvisor readers to see that you are aware of this unfortunate exception and that you are reacting. This is a very old term used in hospitality and called Service Recovery. You have most probably be doing so in the offline world. Now it is just time to realise that there are many more people reading and hearing about you online!

15 Jun 2008

Most searchers limit their quest to first page of results

The latest study from Jupiter Research found that most searchers limit themselves to the first page of results. Meanwhile, the number of searchers that are willing to venture beyond that page, to either the second or third search engine results page has declined again.

Only 17% of searchers head to the second page–and only 7% will venture to the third page.

Why do searchers stay on the first page?

shorter attention span? The Sesame Street factor?

better search results?


How many pages deep do you search?

What page do your search results appear on?

14 Jun 2008

Online booking continues shift to supplier Web sites

According to another comScore report, supplier websites account for 72 percent of online hotel spend as of first quarter 2008, a 3-percentage point increase in dollar share from the previous year. Hotel market share through online travel agency sites (e.g. Expedia and Orbitz) is now down to 28 percent, 3-percentage points down from a year ago.

This trend continues to underscore the importance of every travel related service to provide the option to check availability and continue to the booking, including processing payments from within their own web site.

12 Jun 2008

Marketing

If you read the companion article to this one, the Top Ten Mistakes in Dive Store Website Design, you know that there are a lot of ways in which otherwise good dive store websites can go wrong. And, while it is easy to criticize, what’s more important is to show how to do things right. That’s why we have this article.

Truly effective dive store websites share a number of features in common. If you can learn what these features are, then incorporate them into your store’s website, chances are you’ll increase sales and profits.

How This Article Works

In the pages that follow, we describe a number of features effective dive store websites share. Each of these pages will contain one or more links to a dive store website where you can see actual examples of what we describe. (These links open in a separate window, which you can close when done.)

There are a number of good dive store websites we could have used to illustrate each of the points in this article. The catch is, because these are good websites, they are constantly being changed and updated. That put us at risk of linking you to pages which might no longer contain what it was we wanted you to see.

To solve this problem, we created a complete — but entirely fictional — website for a dive store that doesn’t exist. We call this store Spring Country Dive Adventures, and located it in the town of Gainesville, Florida. The website is real; only the store is phony.

To make our website seem as real as possible, we pretended our phony dive store certifies through PADI and is a dealer for AquaLung, SeaQuest, Suunto, Dive Rite, Atomic and Henderson. The principles we cover, however, will work for almost any dive store, regardless of training agency affiliation or product line.

You may want to spend some time poking around the Spring Country Dive Adventures website, just as though it belonged to a real store. You may find a number of ideas worth taking advantage of — ideas that go beyond just website design.

Read whole article here...

11 Jun 2008

Show off your favorite blogs with a Blog List

Blogger: Dashboard

June 5, 2008permalink
Today we’re releasing a new page element for Layouts blogs: Blog List. The Blog List improves on our Link List page element by using blogs’ RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, and snippets.

Use a Blog List to put a blogroll in your sidebar, or make a few to categorize the blogs you read. The Blog List works well for any page that has an RSS or Atom feed, so you can get creative: link to news sites, podcasts, Twitter streams, search results, or anything else with a feed.

Here’s a quick summary of the features that a Blog List gives you:
  • Link to blogs, web pages, and feeds from your blog’s sidebar, with an optional favicon
  • For pages with RSS and Atom feeds, Blog List can show last updated time, post title, and a snippet of the latest post
  • Sort links alphabetically or by last update time
  • Show all links, or hide some behind a “show all” link
  • Import subscriptions from Google Reader
  • Blog List links are visible to search engine crawlers, so your blog’s PageRank and reputation flow to those you link to

Blogger: Dashboard

10 Jun 2008

Channel Managers, the future....

With all the internet booking going on nowadays, you'd be silly not to be considering site like Expedia and Travelocity as a way to sell your tourism product. In fact there are now literally hundreds of booking engines online, and if you, like me have tried to manage all these sites, you'll realise that it is damn near impossible to do by hand. You end up spending hours of each day just trying to upload the booking sheets to keep every engine up to date.

Well if you haven't yet found it yet, there is a solution custom made for this problem called a Channel Manager. These systems are basically a central engine that you keep up to date and in turn it send the update to all the others automatically. Thereby saving you a LOAD of time.

Here are a couple of the ones on offer:

HBSi's Demand GatewayTM channel management platform connects hotel companies and distribution partners, enabling them to transmit room availability, rates, and bookings data instantaneously. This eliminates time-consuming, error-prone manual processes that disrupt the flow of commerce. As a result, both sides enhance their revenue potential.

ChannelRUSH is a web-based application that helps hoteliers manage Internet revenue channels such as OneTravel.com™, BookIt.com™, Booking.com™, Caesar-Data.com™ and many more.

ChannelDirect is a robust channel management solution that enables you to update rates, inventory and restrictions across multiple third party sites from a single, web-based platform

With ChannelDirect you can increase the number of sites you manage without increasing resources. You can manage ten sites with the same effort required to manage two!

Channelmanager the online hotel front office accommodation bookings and reservation system in Tasmania Australia. Accommodation booking system provides quick book hotel, motel payment portal, automatic hotel reservations, last minute hotel booking and hotel invoices management services

5 Jun 2008

Personal Branding Tips for LinkedIn

Personal Branding Tips for LinkedIn

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network of more than 20 million professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.


When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments, pretty much like an online resume, but with important social networking elements baked into it.

Here are some personal branding and marketing tips to get the most out of your LinkedIn profile:

Add a picture

You can add your picture and display it at the top of your profile. A picture helps create a personal connection and conveys the message that you take networking seriously.

You can use the same picture you use in other social networking sites, so that those who frequent them may identify you more easily (brand recognition).

Create a personalized URL

When you join LinkedIn, your profile will be assigned a random URL such as:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/496/aa7

Not very marketable.

You have the option, however, to create a personalized URL such as:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname/

If you want an even better URL, you can always register yourname.com for less than $10/year and forward it to your LinkedIn profile page for the ultimate in URL branding.

Promote your profile with LinkedIn buttons

Like other social networking sites, LinkedIn offers a wide array of icons and buttons that you can use to promote your LinkedIn profile on your site or blog.

View Mario Sanchez-Carrion's profile on LinkedIn

You can chose among many different styles, and link them to your profile.

Create a LinkedIn email signature file

A LinkedIn email signature file displays your contact information including a link to your LinkedIn profile, in a variety of layout styles. The only caveat is that LinkedIn signatures are designed using HTML, and therefore will work with Outlook but not with Gmail or Hotmail.

If you don’t like any of the default styles, you can always use an HTML editor and create your own signature file, or create one directly in Outlook (you can use one of the LinkedIn buttons discussed before to make the link to your profile stand out).

If you use Gmail or other email provider that doesn’t accept HTML, you can always create a text-based signature file, and include a link to your LinkedIn profile by writing your URL preceded by http://.

Always include a Summary

LinkedIn lets you write a few paragraphs about yourself as part of your profile. You must take advantage of this since the Summary almost always gets read. This is your chance to include your elevator pitch or any other carefully crafted statement where you put your best foot forward.

Make your summary objective, but not boring. Avoid sounding self serving and corporate: if the summary of your qualifications sounds like it came out of an automatic mission statement generator delete everything and start again.

I suggest that you read the profile summaries of several members first, to help you decide how you would like your profile to read.

Participate in Questions & Answers

LinkedIn has a Q&A section where you can pose questions and answer other people’s inquiries. By actively using this feature you can share your expertise with other members and enhance your reputation in your field.

When answering questions, pretend you’re commenting on a blog or an online forum. The idea is to help others and add something meaningful to the conversation, not to openly advertise your products and services. If you are too aggressive you will turn people off. If you honestly try to help, people will naturally come to you.

Fill up the Specialties section carefully

Some LinkedIn users search for people by keyword. For example, if somebody does a LinkedIn search for “Online PR” and the term Online PR is listed among your specialties, your profile has a better chance to pop up for that query. Make sure to include all your areas of expertise in the Specialties field.


Marketing for Independent Professionals and Small Business | Shoestring Branding

2 Jun 2008

How to Compare & Measure Different Brands Using Search Volume

HubSpot was founded in 2006, so we're a relatively small startup company. One issue I have been pondering recently is the HubSpot brand, and how much (or little) we had grown the brand in the past year or so.

One piece of brand-related data that I track is the number of people each month that find us by searching on "HubSpot" in search engines. This number has increased dramatically each month, so clearly more and more people are going to search engines to find information about HubSpot.

But that brand statistic does not tell me how I am doing building the HubSpot brand as compared to other marketing software companies. The question I wanted to answer is "How does HubSpot stack up to other companies that also sell Marketing software?" Most of these companies are not really competitors to HubSpot (they generally sell much more complicated and expensive products aimed at large enterprises) but they are a good proxy for HubSpot's position in the broad market for "marketing software". Here is how I tried to answer this question - I decided to get some search volume data for different companies.

How to Compare Different Brands Using Search Volume

  1. Launch a Google AdWords campaign. Take the list of company or product names from the market in which you are interested, and use those as the keywords for your AdWords campaign. Need more info about how to launch a Google AdWords campaign? Read this article about How to Launch a Google AdWords Campaign for more info.
  2. Make sure to have a high bid per click. You want to have your ad displayed in the top couple results so you are shown as close as possible to 100% of the time. If your ad is not shown all the time, your data will not be accurate.
  3. Set a large daily budget. You don't want Google to decide how often to run your ads based on your budget, you want your ads to be shown as close to 100% of the time as possible. Use the Traffic Estimator in Google AdWords to make sure that your budget is not limiting the number of impressions you are receiving.
  4. Let the campaign run for 3-5 business days. You want to get a few days worth of data so that any daily noise in searches is minimized. Also, try to run the campaign when there are no major announcements or news from any one company happening in your market.
  5. Stop the campaign, check the impressions data. Go into the details of your campaign, and look at the keyword detail, then look at the number of impressions by keyword. You don't care about click through rate (CTR) or the number or cost of clicks. As long as your ads are shown the vast majority of the time for each keyword, you now have an inventory of the number of searches for each company brand over the life of your campaign. You can now rank and compare all the companies or brands in your market. Here's the table I created of marketing software companies.
Company

Searches/Day

Unica

581

Manticore

189

Eloqua

171

Aprimo

112

HubSpot

87

Marketo

34

Market Brite

33

Market to Lead

29

Vtrenz

23

Market2Lead

23

Par Dot

21

LoopFuse

12

ParDot

10

Vtrends

3

After seeing this, I felt pretty good. The companies ahead of us are much larger and older companies, and the sell to very big enterprises and can spend a lot more on marketing. Most of the companies below us are smaller startups, but even a lot of them have been around alot longer than HubSpot.

I was also thinking that as a potential customer of one of these companies, especially the smaller ones, I might want to get a sense of the market traction for each company as a way of telling if they would be around in a year or more from now. In addition to picking software, you are also picking a long term partner, since you want your marketing software vendor to be growing, allowing them to have more and more revenue to increase their spending on R&D so they can continue to invest heavily in the product you are using. As a potential customer, this would make me feel good about HubSpot, since the data indicates HubSpot is one of the top growing marketing software companies.

The whole campaign cost me under $100. A small price to pay for some pretty interesting data. In your market, you might have to pay more, but for most small comanies, especially B2B companies, it will probably not be that expensive.

Have you done this type of analysis for your market? What did you learn?

Expert Marketing Tip - How to Compare & Measure Different Brands Using Search Volume