The fact is: intelligence, when defined as “what’s going on,” is vital to your career and valuable in your marketing efforts. Plus, it’s more fun than doing spreadsheets. So here’s here are our best ninja spy tricks for 2010.

1. Set up some Google Alerts. Google employs an army of robots that regularly sweep every nook and cranny of cyberspace and, in so doing, they offer a nifty little free service. If you want to know every time a certain word or phrase comes up, they’ll notify you. Just Google “Google Alerts” and follow the prompts. Google will email you every 24 hours and tell you when your name (or your company’s name, your competitor’s name, your product, or whatever) came up.

2. Just Google. Periodically conduct searches for your own name, the name of your boss or colleagues, names of competitors, and so on. Another interesting thing to do is to pick your product or service and Google it and see who appears on the right-hand side. Those are people who pay to appear on the front page for certain keywords (in other words, ads).  Just who is advertising for your medical device or drug keywords (hint: sometimes it’s a lawyer).

3. Find out what they’re paying to advertise. There are lots of roundabout ways to do this, but the quickest and most fun is Spyfu.com. Just go there and type in the keyword (your product or keyword) and you’ll get a short report of how many entities are paying for advertising for that keyword and what they’re paying. You can also see their ad budgets in a nifty bar graph form. This is just for the free introductory Spyfu part–you can get even more information if you subscribe to the service.

4. Want to know who is on your website the most often? (Hint: it’s your competitors.) You should have a chat with the IT people who can pull up statistics in terms of how many hits you got each month (or even each day, if you want to drill down like that), the main locations of these folks, the keywords they used, and the sites they came from. This won’t be too specific but it will confirm that your site’s main visitors (especially to the in-depth technical pages) are your competitors.

5. So now you have to see how these competitive websites are doing. Actually, you can see how just about any large website is doing. Go to Alexa.com and you can get some stats. This does not cover every website–just the largest ones. Compare yourself to the other main sites in your field.

6. Ever wonder where your main web visitors come from? You can get stats from your IT guy but that just covers your company. Pick your industry keywords (ibuprofen, back pain, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, whatever) and go to Google Trends (just Google “Google Trends”) and enter the keyword. You get a nifty graph showing how popular these terms are. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the main countries that hit these keywords, the main cities, and the main languages of the people interested in the material. It’s an eye-opener. For instance, India is the top country for seeking information based on the keyword “pacemaker.” And “chronic pain”? Tampa, Florida.

7. Need statistics? This may not seem “secret” but you can uncover some amazing information if you spend enough time at the motherlode of all statistical information: cdc.gov. Just go to the site and search for whatever term you want and statistics (obesity statistics, kidney disease statistics). Many marketing people do not know even the basic statistics in their field, and that’s a shame. There can be good information there. For instance, obesity is much more common among Hispanics than other ethnic groups in the United States. Could that help you better market your obesity-related products and services?

8. Venture into foreign-language sites. Many medical companies have branches, offices, distributors, or associations with foreign offices developing or marketing their products. If you can grab a foreign-language brochure or some foreign-language web content, you can get it translated to get the scoop on a product that may very well be coming Stateside soon.  Here is a hint: Babelfish and other automatic translation services do not work well. They work well if you’re translating “cat.” They do not work well on complete sentences, words that might have more than one meaning, and complex texts. Hire a real translator.

9. Attend scientific sessions in your field. I have seen so many marketing people go to a medical convention as waste the opportunity by treating it as a schmooze-fest. Now if you make money schmoozing, that may be fine. But scientific meetings are great places to learn about cutting-edge therapies and–this is the best part–hearing real-world physician objections to these approaches. Most scientific sessions focus on problems, challenges, shortfalls; the doctors get together to share their troubles, not boast about new opportunities. Sit in on these meetings and you’ll learn a lot because doctors think they are talking just to their peers (not industry). Listen up and you may hear what doctors really think about morphine infusion pumps or direct-to-consumer ads for that purple pill or a new electronic records software system. You’ve got to attend a lot of sessions to get good stuff, but you can find real gold here. In many cases, what doctors say in these settings is more honest and valuable than what comes out in even well-run focus groups.

10. Read. Medical companies are like doctors in that they like to read and put words on paper. This is a big advantage for competitive intelligence. Monitor journals, the web, and get field force team members to get copies of product literature from competitive companies. Now there is a very secret trick to make this technique work that a lot of people don’t bother with. Don’t just collect the stuff. Read it. Analyze it. If your competitor just launched some new widget, gather all that information together and sit down and study it. Most marketers read competitive materials haphazardly, if at all. Bring it together and start to sift through it in a meaningful way.

Those are 10 ninja spy tips. But there are a still a few more. You should also spy on yourself. Is your own company really doing all it can to market its brand?

• Go outside the company and, for grins, call in and pretend to be a doctor-customer with a problem. See how quickly you get to the right person to help you.
• On a random day, take a tour of the facility. What does the lobby look like? What are conference rooms like? How is the cafeteria? Break rooms? Rest rooms? Parking lot? If you have customers who visit your facility, these things all matter.
• On another random day, check out the links on your website. You can do this yourself or get somebody to do it. (You can even build your own software to test it automatically.) The point is that links break–don’t ask me why. Check your website by clicking through at random, here, there, and in a few more places. If there are broken links, report them to the webmaster and consider running more in-depth tests. (Remember, the average visitor to your site who encounters a broken link will just leave; they won’t try to work around it or report it to you.)
• Send yourself a letter or package and see how long it takes to get to you. Some companies handle this like champs and in others, incoming mail has to go through the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. If your mail service is lacking, run and document a few more tests and then discuss it with your receiving department.
• Pick key people in your department and search for yourself online. You’d be amazed how many young professionals have knuckleheaded Facebook pages set up. Talk it over with human resources first, but then have a heart-to-heart with these young pups who think that funny half-naked pictures are good for business. (Many people who seem web-savvy are actually amazed that other people can find things online. These guys may think that their Facebook or other pages are “private” or too obscure for other people to find. Prove them wrong.)

As you can see, these things are not really spying. They are just information gathering techniques. But the thing that separates great marketers from mediocre marketers is often just a simple matter of research and extra legwork.

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