A small business or startup company looking for a proven method to compete for the attention of prospective customers, can get marketing ideas and find niche sales opportunities by gathering competitive intelligence about their competition's online marketing campaigns.

Discovering and tracking where a competitor has had success by doing deep-web searches, tracking ongoing online marketing campaigns, looking for non-paid partners who link to websites, and researching journalists who have covered competitors or their products, are all places a small business owner can start their research. A small business can use this research to find opportunities where their competitor’s have already had success, and work to repeat the success for their company.

Generating marketing ideas by investigating the adwords campaigns of competitors, or by searching for competitor names, products and marketing campaigns across different social networks can be tricky to organize and monitor over time. Small business owners who invest time to do a competitive analysis can keep track of all their research by using online project planning software.

Marketing communications software provides small businesses with a private, password-protected virtual workspace they can use to save and organize web-links, notes and files on their research or other marketing ideas. Small business owners who organize their marketing campaigns research into a central workspace can use the data to assist in the developing of their own marketing ideas for promoting their business. Virtual workspaces also provide small business owners with better control over marketing campaigns when they are in play.

Applicant manager software like http://applicants.wizehive.com from WizeHive provides a virtual workspace that small businesses can use to manage incoming responses to marketing campaigns.  Companies can launch campaigns through email, text message alerts, on a company website or through social networks, and specify a central marketing workspace where all the data that is collected will be saved.

Online marketing communications software provides small business owners with marketing communications tools that can assist in the research of marketing ideas, the planning of marketing campaigns, and the implementation of online advertising campaigns.

Author: Clint Garwood