You're competing against hundreds or thousands of competitors. They're armed with sophisticated tools, armies of contractors, and great ideas. So you need to make sure you have the advantage in market knowledge. Knowing more about what your users need and how they interact with your products and posts help you get the edge - an edge that could be the difference between winning and losing. Here are four tools that will help you.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is used by over 10 million websites - with good reason. Google Analytics tells you about what your customers do while they are on your website. It gives you a snapshot of the pages they visit, the order in which they visit them and how often they come back. It shows you how many people visit you daily and over time. And it tells you where the visitors come from.
With this information, you can better aim your marketing messages, determine where to spend your valuable online ad dollars and social media efforts, and figure out what parts of your website cause people to leave.
AppsLoader & AppsWatch
These tools from NRG Global, a Los Angeles-based firm whose products test the performance of applications like Citrix, GE Healthcare, Java, Oracle and Windows, have only recently started to come to the forefront, but are already being used widely by web-services, healthcare and universities to make sure the web-based applications they deliver are doing the job and not causing problems. They use image recognition in a unique way to "see" what your users are seeing; and so can be applied to almost any web application.
With AppsLoader, you test your application before launching. It simulates a user environment and shows you where you might encounter problems. It's a great way to get rid of the most likely causes of customer dissatisfaction early.
AppsWatch uses similar techniques to monitor your web-based application once it is up and running, and points out where actual users are encountering specific performance issues. It's a great tool to understand where issues are happening now and where they may happen in the future as your business grows.
Since one of the keys to continued growth is to provide a product that users love, these testing/monitoring tools will help you grow your business, and do it in a way that avoids extra effort and fire-drill activities that come from unidentified product problems.
SurveyMonkey
Asking questions is one of the best way to understand your market. SurveyMonkey is a popular online survey tool that makes it easy to understand what's going on in the minds of your customers and where your markets might be.
To use SurveyMonkey, you set up a survey, and lead people to a web-link where they can answer the questions in your survey. Then you login to your SurveyMonkey account to see what your respondents had said.
SurveyMonkey can give you both quantitative and qualitative information. You can use it with your current customers to understand what they like and dislike about your product; and you can use it with non-users to see what will cause them to buy or what features you need to include in your product.
Getting That 360 Degree View
Ultimate success is based in part on having a great product and communicating the benefits to the right prospects. Combining these tools with other tools in your social marketing arsenal will help you ensure your product is optimized for your target audience and that you are communicating the benefits to the right people in the best way possible.
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