How To Use Social Media Tools To Spy On Droga5 and Ogilvy
I admit it. I put the powerful word ‘spy’ and the agencies Droga5 and Ogilvy in the headline to get your attention. Droga5 and Ogilvy are rather famous so the use of their names should get me some extra views from agencies that are interested in having a better understanding of these industry leaders.
I’ll use them as examples of how you can use some social media tools to spy on any agency competitor or even your perspective clients. I found these tools while building out my advice to my agency clients on how they can create a smarter, more effective blog strategy. An obvious point is coming.
Understanding what keywords, blog subjects, and Tweets are working for other agencies (and prospective clients) will help you write and market blog posts that will work harder to drive traffic back to your website.
To understand what will social media tactics will work for you, it is a good idea to look at what currently works for your competition. To get there, I use a couple of primarily free tools. Most of these tools have a more robust paid version. Dig in.
The Social Media Spy Toolbox
SimilarWeb
Start here. SimilarWeb delivers a very quick look at traffic insights for any website. Within seconds of typing in a website, you’ll get its global and country rank, plus nice graphs on other attributes.
One nice feature is how easily you can compare more than one website. I tried this out comparing J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy. It is interesting to see who’s winning.
SEMRush
SEMRush is another great place to start your journey because it specializes in competitor data. You type in a competitor’s URL to get information on their organic keywords and rank, ad keywords, and traffic. The Droga5 page shows that Droga5 is famous. A very high percentage of their traffic comes from direct searches on their name. Fame is a very good thing to increase marketing efficiency. But, you knew that. If not, read this blog post on the high value of being famous.
Marketing Grader
Hubspot’s Marketing Grader offers a very fast look at a website’s social media prowess. The tool works at warp speed to help you compare agencies or clients on various social media metrics. I did a quick look at comparing Droga5 and the very social expert agency Likeable. Likeable has a social score of 91 and Droga5 only gets a 43. Surprising that one of the most famous full-service creative agencies scores less than half of a much smaller social agency. Note: I’d imagine that Likeable has to work much harder to drive their traffic (and they do it very well.)
This kind of comparative marketing information would be great to put in front of prospective clients. Clients react well to ‘scores.’ Just for the hell of it, I put in www.oreos.com to see how this seemingly smart social media marketer (remember the Super Bowl Tweet?) did. Hmm, only got a 36. Hey, go pitch their social programs.
SpyFu:
SpyFu is a free tool that shows the keywords that websites buy and the website’s organic rank. The service also gives cost per click and detailed search volume statistics on keywords. This is an easy-to-use tool that lets you know which keywords your competitors are targeting, both in organic search and in AdWords. You simply type in your competitor and you can download an entire list of these keywords. use the ones that work in your blog.
WPP’s John St. is one of the most popular agencies in Canada. You’ll see that most of their organic search traffic is coming directly from searches on Canada and Toronto. If you have a ‘local’ agency positioning, make sure you use your hometown in more than one place on your website.
Keywordtool.io
I use Keywordtool.io to help me find up to 750 keywords related to my business. Here is an example of how an agency interested in growing its healthcare client roster could use it. As you can see, using keywords that include healthcare ‘trends’, ‘news’ and ‘plan’ will help you drive traffic to your specialized healthcare blog or microsite.
BuzzSumo
I love this tool because BuzzSumo helps me to understand what the social media universe digs for any topic or competitor. Once again, I aimed this tool at the term ‘healthcare marketing’ to see what actual articles have garnered the most shares. BuzzSumo delivers actual shares from LinkedIn, Twitter, Goggle+ and Pinterest. You can filter your shares for activity by articles, infographics, guest posts, interviews and videos.
Once again, this is a sweet tool to look hard at the competition and the clients you want to dazzle.
Need even more tools to drive agency growth?
Head over to my post: 11 Must Have Ad Agency Business development Tools
Michael Birch says
No keyword research is complete without search suggestions, especially when it comes to mobile search, where people often use those to save time. I don’t have the numbers but I remeber that mobile users click on search suggestions a lot more often and those suggestions are very different from your regular queries, especially questions and such. Example: https://serpstat.com/keywords/questions/?query=bluetooth+speaker&se=g_us