their traffic is coming from.Using a host of tools (detailed in the three sections that follow: “Setting up Google Alerts,” “Setting up Twitter alerts,” and “Monitoring social networks”), you can learn more about the traffic to their website and other channels. It’s worth noting that the strongest brands get significant traffic from social referrals (people coming in via Facebook and Twitter) along with the search engines.
Rankings by important engines.You can do a quick look at major ranking engines such as Alexa (www.alexa.com) to see how their sites compare with yours. For very large competitors, sites like Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) can help you determine how many people are visiting your competitors’ websites and whether they are visiting the desktop or mobile versions. Another important tool to look at is Google webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools), which lets you see the approximate traffic of a website and the profiles of the people visiting, including the other sites they visit and their various interests.
Which social media platforms they are on and which distribution channels they use.As we discuss earlier, if you don’t know where your customers spend their time, you won’t be able to market to them where they are most comfortable. You can’t count on their going to your website. Most businesses are now using several channels besides their websites (such as a blog, Twitter, and so on), so be aware of their choices and see what could work for you. And as you look at this data, keep in mind that you may not have the resources to have strong social presences in all the places that your customers are — you’ll have to make strategic choices on where to spend your time and money.
Who they partner with.This is an often-overlooked source of competitive information. Businesses find synergy and partner with those who have similar audiences. Whom they partner with tells you a lot about how they view their audience. Those partnerships could also include where they advertise, people or organizations with whom they have comarketing agreements, and partners who serve as referral engines for them.
Loyalty and other programs they employ.Find out what programs are keeping their customers loyal to them, and see how you can tap into the same vein with your own unique program. A recent trend is the creation of Social Loyalty programs, which reward consumers for social actions that they take on behalf of brands. This is something worth paying attention to as well.
Their online customer service efforts.This one can be a secret weapon for you. If you see that your competitors aren’t offering support through social media channels, you can distinguish your company with a solid effort here. According to Bain & Company, a customer is four times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related versus price or product related.
What they do offline to connect with customers.Check out whether your competitors have special training programs or other educational sessions available locally. This might be a way they are increasing their customer base consistently.
Setting up Google Alerts
You can set up these free alerts for keywords related to your competitors. These keywords can include company names, brands, senior manager names, and partner names. Every day, you receive a Google Alert in your email Inbox with summaries of news stories and blog posts that include those keywords. It’s a good starting point and completely free.
To set up a Google Alert, follow these simple steps:
1 Go to www.google.com/alerts.The Google Alerts page opens, as shown in Figure 2-9.
2 Enter the search terms for which you want alerts.Try to keep these to one word or a commonly used phrase.
3 From the Sources drop-down list, choose the sources of content you want Google to search.We generally choose Automatic so that we don’t miss news items.
4 From the How Often drop-down list, choose the frequency with which you want the alerts delivered to you.We find At Most Once a Day to be the best frequency.
5 Enter the email address where you want the alerts to be sent.Remember that you can edit these alert settings at any time.
6 Click the Create Alert button.
FIGURE 2-9: Google Alerts.
Setting up Twitter alerts
Similarly, create Twitter alerts that track those same keywords in the Twitter world. Services such as Twilert (www.twilert.com) let you follow keywords and observe all the microblogging posts in which those words appear.
1 Go to www.twilert.com.The Twilert home page opens, as shown in Figure 2-10.To set up a Twitter alert, you have to be signed in to your Twitter account. If you don’t have one, you can sign up at www.twitter.com.
2 Type the keyword that you want the alert set up for.
3 Click the Create Twilert button.
FIGURE 2-10: Twilert.
Monitoring social networks
You probably want to observe what your customers are doing on the various social networks. That’s a little harder to do because most social networks are closed gardens, meaning that except for the public profile pages (a very small percentage of all the pages on the network), you can’t search them with external tools, and typically, after you log in, you can’t search the universe of activity on them. However, what you can do is search and follow the pages, profiles, groups, and applications
