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Are you looking for more ways to get your business found by your local customers? Would you like to discover more marketing opportunities in your area? Competitive monitoring is something that will help you achieve both tasks.
While you may be thinking ‘but I monitor my local competitors already’, I’m here to tell you: there is always more that you can do.
Monitoring your local competitors on social media, for example, could Cork E-Bikes Zone uncover lots of opportunities for your business. Mainly, it could allow you to:
Identify your competitors’ social media and community building tactics
Be the first to know when your competitor is offering a special offer or preparing for an event
Learn from them by discovering hashtags that trigger local visibility, marketing channels that seem to work best, influencers they work with, local nonprofits or businesses they promote, efforts that drive new backlinks and brand visibility for them, etc.
Competitive monitoring is useful on so many levels, making it highly surprising that so few local businesses actually use it to its full potential.
Who to monitor?
When it comes to local marketing, this question is more challenging to answer than in any other sector, simply because very few local businesses are actually active on social media.
But, by limiting your monitoring to only your obvious local competitors, you could end up with a very low amount of data to work with.
To expand your search and make the most of your efforts, consider monitoring:
Obvious local competitors that you are aware of
Similar businesses elsewhere (you may not compete with them locally but there may be a lot to learn from them)
Other local businesses in your area. This way you will be better informed on local events and trends.
To find local brands, search Twitter and Instagram using terms that describe your area—whether it’s something as obvious as your town name or a more advanced keyword, like your county or a nearby attraction.
To discover more terms to use when searching social media, run your main city or town name through Text Optimizer. This tool will uncover which local entities Google associates your city name with. Here’s an example of results for [Albany]:
Next, search for all these locations on Twitter and Instagram to find updates from the local business:
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