What was the best part about using Rival IQ?
This is a valuable software as a service which allows you to gain insight from many perspectives in regards to your marketing campaigns. It's easy to add your business, competitors, name your landscape and get going quickly. The user interface is relatively user friendly and there are interactive tutorials to help guide you through the basic functionality upon initially logging in to your account. You can analyze multiple social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn which covers all of the networks our start up brand will utilize. I like the ability to analyze social posts for engagement, keyword, hashtag and more. Each social channel is broken down according to relevant metrics according to network terminology and the cross channel capabilities allow you to view your business analytics relative to your competition. You can integrate Google Analytics which is helpful. The SEO metrics utilize Moz data and make it easy to learn this data. Keyword positioning is provided by SEMRush which is an industry standard and trusted in the space as well which I appreciate. The SEM data provides insight into your adwords campaigns is valuable as well. Reporting is available in summaries for social media channels and complete data can be exported in powerpoint and csv formats. You can setup email alerts as well as custom branding for whitelabel purposes which is great.
What would you change about your experience with Rival IQ?
The only issue I have with this software is that the pricing is not particularly viable for start ups, and I already knew all of the data available in my account from use of various other tools. One in particular provides a free forever plan with much more detail in their report for your business. But I freely admit this is the simplest way to compare your business with your competition having so much under the hood.
Overall Feedback
Once you have a solid following and keyword positioning there's no doubt it's a very simple, consolidated, centralized system for obtaining a high level overview and decent targeted stats regarding your social media, SEO, SEM and web analytics. I've done extensive research into the best systems for our business and have systems in place which grant me access to all of what this software provides. Though it is refreshing to have it all in one place. Our brand is about to scale up massively over the next couple of years but we're not quite at the point that we can justify the cost yet. But if you're business is already thriving I highly suggest at least checking it out, there's a free trial available with no credit card and a human from their team will help validate your data matrix too.