Competitive Advantage: What digital tools are going to be used in 2021 to give brands the edge?
Trying to remain ahead of the competition is always one of the central challenges for Digital Marketers. The digital landscape has opened up a multitude of skills and tools that executed to try and promote, track and maintain your brands, increase their visibility and ultimately increase sales (which is what we really want at the end of the day, right?!) They allow the savvy marketeers to find their key audiences, decide when is the right season to launch a product and exact the very best time/day of the week for Adspend to maximise ROI.
We think about this a lot at Trendlab. So here are 5 platforms which we see having a real tangible effect on Digital Marketing in 2021.
Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to search, track, and compare Google search terms and topics over a period of time and by location. It’s predominately aimed at businesses that want to learn about how their brand/business is doing among their targeted audience — quite simply in terms of how often it is searched for and when its popularity peaks.
Google Trends helps measure brand popularity, understand new customers, track trends (obviously!), and communicate more clearly. Its primary focus is on the popularity of a keyword over a set time.
The Good:
- Free. That can be important.
- It’s Google. With Google’s data. That’s the #1 website by traffic…in the world.
- Very simple to use.
The Bad:
- Basic functionality — you might want more insight!
- Not so smart data — so no actionable insights!
- Limited demographics — and demographics is destiny!
Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook audience insights is Facebook’s flagship data product and one of the most powerful tools available for audience research.
Facebook’s greatest asset is its reach with over 2 billion active users and ad revenues that exceeds everyone outside of Google. You need to be savvy though, because that’s a lot of brands vying for eyes that you need to stand out from.
The Good:
- Free access — well, sort of. Your data helps…
- It’s Facebook. With Facebook’s data. That’s the #3 website by traffic.
- Insightful — the clue is in the name. It’s revolutionised the way we target.
The Bad:
- It can be challenging to use. It’s so sophisticated that you might find it has just too many filters.
- Pre-determined search vs Free search
- The only data is Facebook data. That means you’re missing Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Reddit… and more). It’s just one slice of a pretty big cake.
Brandwatch
‘Brandwatch is a subscription-based, social media marketing and monitoring platform that handles a variety of tasks, such as data collection, post scheduling, conversation crawling and more’ — Selecthub
Users will have access to a comprehensive database with millions of daily new posts plus more than 1 trillion (!!) posts dating back to 2008 — that’s a lot of data. The capacity is endless include and features data sets from subjects as diverse as AI, image analysis, surveys and more.
The Good:
- A really sophisticated platform that includes social media, news & blogs,
- A leader in its field with smart use of AI and machine learning.
- The opportunity to engage in bespoke Consultancy services.
The Bad:
- The price. It’s EXPENSIVE (£41.000/year min.) — which may put it out of reach for the typical SME.
- It’s challenging to use ideally you’d need a Branwatch expert in-house.
- It’s useful if you have coding skills. Many have not.
Google News
Google News collects various types of news and sorts them according to its relevance. Google News finds users relevant news for them with its main strength being to collect the most important content from a broad range of websites latest news and trends.
The Good:
- Again, it’s free.
- It has data across all the big publishers.
- It’s very simple to use.
The Bad:
- With simplicity comes basic functionality.
- There is no enhanced data — by this we mean no top mentions, top entities, news sentiment, news clustering and summary.
- It’s not available in on all countries
At Trendlab, we’re proud that our platform, which is informed by the latest advancements in AI and Machine Learning, is as easy to use as Google Tends but with vast more analytics. Data is part of our DNA, and with 86% of businesses not having access to comprehensive smart market and customer data, we want customers to have inside access to future consumer and market insights.
This way, you can be the first to market with upcoming trends before they get mainstream. We give you detailed reports for your industry, consumers and brand, ensuring that you can make informed data-driven decisions at the click of a button.
The key to success within the Digital Marketing sphere is to have a host of tools and skills at your fingertips. We like to think that we can punch well above our weight.
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