If you’re searching for something online, there’s a 92 percent chance that you’re using Google to find it. Monitoring digital trends and conversations can give businesses the opportunity to proliferate their brand and their message online.
Incorporating Google Alerts into your online marketing strategy will help your business gather market intelligence and inform you every time your brand is mentioned online. In fact, you can set up multiple alerts to track anything relating to your business or industry at large, by inputting specific keywords.
Whether you want to monitor your mentions, your competitor’s digital activity or the latest, emerging trends in your industry; Google Alerts can give you the insights you need to your grow your brand’s online presence and visibility.
Why You Should Start Using Google Alerts
By identifying your target market and listening to your audience, companies can begin to build a strategy for improving their brand exposure and online presence. Google Alerts provides businesses with in-depth analytics and real-time insights about what your customers are talking about online.
Businesses that are cultivating the conversation surrounding their brand are able to inform the public about their products or services more easily, turning potential customers into buying ones. By monitoring industry trends online, you’re given the opportunity to get out ahead of new or emerging market trends. Your company can become more agile and adaptable; able to change marketing or sales strategies more quickly and effectively.
You Can Monitor Anything with Google Alerts
It’s true, you can monitor anything and everything that occurs on the Internet. While it’s quick and easy to set dozens of Google Alerts, you need to limit those tracking terms to what’s useful and relevant. The goal is to only track information that can help you grow your brand or business. There are three key categories that should be used to create the most effective alerts:
Brand Activity
Monitoring the conversation around your brand will help you determine what clients or customers are saying about your business and the sentiment surrounding your brand. Positive or negative, all feedback gives you the chance to improve an aspect of your digital marketing by measuring your public reputation. Use the positive feedback to drive interactions and market your brand and use the negative feedback to correct errors and improve your online communication.
Competition Activity
The same way that you can gain insights into the performance and online activity of your business, you can monitor the same information about your competitors. You can see what’s working and what’s not in your industry. Their strategies and techniques could help influence your online marketing strategy and avoid some of their mistakes.
Industry Trends
The most informed businesses will always have an advantage over their competition. Use Google Alerts to track general trends, new opportunities, attitude changes and market activity within your industry. Get to know your target market, learn about industry shifts and follow news about your clients, to ensure your business is in the know.
Setting Up Google Alerts for Your Business
Here are the basic steps for setting up Google Alerts for you or your business:
- Go to https://www.google.com/alerts
- Enter any search term(s) that you’d like to track. A results preview will give you suggestions on what terms are useful.
- Below the search box, select “show options”. There, you can choose how often you’d like to receive these alerts. It can be daily, weekly or as it happens.
- Choose the ideal source types you want to monitor, for example: news, blogs, video, social media posts, forums or finance. You can either opt for the “automatic” selection or refine your alerts to specific media types.
- Choose your language and region.
- Filter your results by selecting “all results” or “only the best results”.
- Specify your delivery email address.
- Finally, select “Create alert.”
Don’t worry about entering too many or too few search terms, or choosing the right media sources, this can all be edited at a later stage. Separate each search term with a comma if you’re entering multiple terms and put quotation marks around your queries if your keywords need to be in a specific order.
Start by tracking your company, blog or product’s names and include keywords or jargon that are related to your industry. You can also search for common misspellings of your industry jargon or company name. Consider what types of information you’re receiving and set notifications to the appropriate frequency, such as making industry trends a weekly alert and your company’s name a daily alert.
Using the Results
All of these alerts are setup to help you learn about your brand’s reputation and gain insights into your company’s online presence. Monitor social media, reviews sites, blogs and forums to identify where and how your brand’s being spoken about. As important is ensuring that your business is accessible from those mentions, whether you’re linked or unlinked.
If there are individuals, groups or websites mentioning you or your products, make sure they are linking to your site. If not, engage on the post so as to increase your visibility and make your site more accessible to more people. Having more links to your site online, will boost your Google Ranking and improve your SEO optimisation.
If your company is posting regular content, you have to monitor when your newly published content is being indexed by Google. You can do this by setting up a Google Alert for the title of an article, link to a post or URL for your site’s online content. Online content creation’s one of the most important parts of modern business, but it’s as important that all of your content’s being seen and shared.
The Final Alert
Don’t overuse the Google Alert tool, as your inbox may be overwhelmed with notifications of who’s saying what, where. By cultivating a careful and curated set of Google Alert keywords and search terms, you have the opportunity to keep track of your industry and brand’s online activity, easily.
It’s not just about what is being said online about your brand, but how many people are saying it and if your target market agrees with those sentiments. Don’t wait to gain the invaluable insights and actionable data made available through Google Alerts.
Find out how we can take your brand’s digital marketing to the next level, contact Cognite Marketing to book your free strategy consultation.
