Yesmail Interactive has launched a tool that lets marketers track their competitors and follow new campaigns in real time. The platform, called Yesmail Market Intelligence, allows marketers who join to follow the digital marketing activity of other brands, from the times they deploy email blasts to the number of views their YouTube channel received the previous week.
Yesmail, an Infogroup company, draws the data from publicly available sources and offers them to Market Intelligence members in a centralized, more easily navigable format.
“It changes how marketers monitor what competitors are doing,” said Jason Warnock, VP of market intelligence and measurement for Yesmail Interactive. “Just as you would add a friend on Facebook, you can add a marketer to your marketing network here and anything they put out appears there in real time.”
Marketers buy membership packages that allow them to follow a certain number of brands. A main feed offers updates on the latest email, Facebook, or other digital campaigns that have launched, while a sidebar notes which brands have seen the biggest lift in social media numbers in the last week.
Marketers are able to drill down specifically into brands’ email, Facebook, and Twitter marketing, pulling up such specific details as the top Tweets mentioning the brand, or look at the creative for a particular email blast. Marketers can also make side-by-side comparisons of brand’s digital efforts.
“It’s a social listening tool but it’s much more than that,” said Warnock. “You see their entire digital strategy unfolded.”
He gave the example of marketer Home Depot tracking a competitor like Lowe’s Home Improvement. If Home Depot had plans for a free shipping promotion to go out on a Thursday, but Home Depot saw that Lowe’s released one on Tuesday, the marketer could readjust the campaign accordingly.
The service is currently in beta mode, being tested by six companies ranging from an airline to a film studio.
