With digital tools and online marketing, it has become easier and cheaper than ever for businesses to launch marketing and public relations campaigns to gain traction and stay ahead of the competition. New campaigns can be created and launched in a matter of days or hours. This is why it’s so important, even for local businesses, to track and analyze competitors in real-time.

The upside of the internet age, if you’re a business owner, is that most of your competitors’ marketing efforts are going to have some sort of digital footprint. Be it through social media, PR, advertising, or content marketing, it’s all being indexed online, available for you to view. You just need the right systems in place to help you wade through all of the non-essential content and find the information that matters.

Tools like the social media monitoring technology found in the Qebot platform help you do just that. Use the tool to monitor the internet for keywords related to your industry and competition. You can even adjust your search by geo-location to only see information about your local community.

Once your feeds are configured, you’ll start to see all of the relevant information you want about the industry and the competitive landscape of your local community. Use this to understand what your competitors are doing for promotions, PR, community relations, and social media marketing.

Say you want to do one-off searches for specific key terms of interest, but only for a short time. For example, you’d like to see if anyone is starting to talk about Labor Day weekend and promoting their massage business, but you don’t want to make an entire feed about it and clog up your usual content. The search tool solves this problem.

Or, say your competition write blogs on a regular basis and you have Google Alerts set up so that you can keep up with their regular content creation. Use the Feeds tab to aggregate all of their content into an easily consumable format, keeping you up to date with what they are doing and saying.

With these tools you should be able to stay well aware of what your competition is doing in your local area and ensure you are positioning your business in the best way possible to stay ahead of the curve. Tools like these can also help to spark creative ideas and give way to engaging content for your business to start sharing through your own social and online marketing channels.

So get out there and start understanding your competitive landscape.

To learn more about the social monitoring tool, or any other tools on the Qebot platform, check us out at Qebot.com or email us at success@qebot.com for more information.

Want to learn more about how Qebot can help you grow you business? Check us out at qebot.com.