The other day, I was in a conversation with a marketing analyst from a top-tier company. She was asking me a few questions about my marketing and I was thinking, “I’m not sure if I really have what it takes to make a great marketing analyst.” She then turned her attention to me and told me, “You’re a very good listener.” I felt like she was suggesting that I was just not listening.
I’m a lot like that. I only listen to what I need to hear. I don’t like to interrupt people and I’m particularly shy, so I try to avoid getting in the middle of conversations. I use my time to listen, but I also use it to ask questions and write down my thoughts. I don’t read every marketing article or blog post I read. The more I know about marketing, the better I get at it.
I don’t read a ton of marketing articles. I read a lot of marketing blog posts, but the marketing blog posts tend to be very technical and not at all about the actual marketing of the company. What I read about is the marketing strategies of the companies that I am interested in, and I follow these companies to see what their strategies are.
Marketing analytics companies are companies that do very specific, scientific things to gain insight into the marketing of a company. They may be focused on a specific product, or they may be focused on a specific market, or they may be focused on a specific industry. A lot of companies focus on segmentation, and then they focus on the data that they collect to see how well certain segments of the population are doing in the market.
I think I would go as far as saying that the majority of marketing analytics companies have a very small budget. Some may have a smaller budget, and they focus on segmenting their customers, and then they collect their data about that segment, and they analyze the data to see what that segment is doing.
Again, this is one of the reasons I’m a member here at SEOmoz.com. We put a lot of thought into how we collect data, what kinds of segments we include, and how we analyze it. So I’m not saying that marketing analytics companies don’t have a budget. I’m just saying that they’re not going to try to spend a lot of money unless they have to.
I have to say that I have never seen marketing analytics companies do their own analytics. I do know that they often use software like WebTrends.com and SEMRush.com, but Im not sure if they actually use it.
With SEOmoz, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between a company that has their own analytics and one that just uses a software like WebTrends.com and SEMRush.com. The first company will say that it has their own analytics, whereas the second will say that they run a software suite. SEOmoz will have a few more marketing analytics companies, but this is a small sample size.
With SEOmoz, you can see the traffic that Google sends to a website through Google Analytics and the number of backlinks that your site gets on Google. Also, you can see how much traffic that your site gets from the search engines (search engine spiders). Then you can see how much traffic that Google gets from other search engines.
SEOmoz has a ton of different companies that they run. Sometimes they will have smaller companies that they just work with on a regular basis to help them develop new search engine optimization strategies. Other times, they may have big companies that they bring in on a regular basis. It’s probably best to just check out their website and see what they have to offer.
