Hot Apps and Tactics for Competitive Research and Enhancing Lead Generation

Do you ever find yourself wasting hours on monitoring the competition or pulling your hair out over how to boost lead generation and maximize marketing ROI? There's an app for that…

In fact, there are four handy apps and tactics businesses should be using to streamline market research, keep an eye on their competitors, and boost their revenues.

1. Perch

Perch is a new Foursquare powered app that allows businesses to automate competitive research, delivering daily and weekly reports of competitors social posts, promotions, and daily deals. Apps like this can shave hours of market research every week and means no entrepreneur has an excuse for not staying in the loop and on top of their game. However, a side benefit of monitoring competitors' social activities also acts as a targeting system to know whose followings businesses should be chasing after and winning over too.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts may not be brand new but they are great tools for finding out who is doing what, who is stealing the top spots on Google with better SEO, and what competitors are doing that might be worth emulating.

3. Toll Free Number Reverse Lookups

Custom Toll Free's reverse lookup app for toll free numbers is a great way for businesses to find out which players are moving in on their markets and are targeting their customers. Fortunately this tool also simultaneously serves up a list of powerful vanity number options which are currently available to fight back too.

4. Phone Surveys

Encouraging customers to call in to toll free hotlines to participate in surveys is also a great way to deliver rewards, keep on top of customer service, and position new products to win, while boosting customer retention. Some may already be doing this but most overlook the power of using their call center staff to also capitalize on the advantages of outbound calling for completing surveys for simultaneous market research and lead generation, versus tradition hard cold calling.