Local Market Monopoly

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Clarence Fisher: Have you subscribed to the Local Market Monopoly newsletter yet? Each week you get one actionable digital marketing tip delivered straight to your inbox designed specifically for small businesses like you who want to increase their market share and grow their online presence. Each tip focuses on strategies for growing your online reputation, increasing your company's reach, and improving sales and referrals without wasting money on ineffective tactics. Sign up now at localmarketmonopoly.com and start receiving our best of the best strategies immediately.

Intro: You're listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher uncovering the tools, tactics, and strategies, the most successful small businesses used to dominate their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. It's Clarence Fisher, your host, and this is episode 69. We're going to talk about how you can monitor your competition without breaking a sweat. It's going to be a pretty quick episode today. We actually piggy piggybacking, you know what? How are you doing today? How are you? I'm, I'm sorry. I didn't even ask. I hope you're doing well. Really, really do. Welcome back. So glad to have you here. Okay, back to the lesson at hand. We're going to piggyback off of an earlier episode, I think it was episode 61, where we talked about how to monitor what people are saying about you and your business online, and you'll want to go visit that because we went over more than what we're just we're going to do today, but one of those strategies can be used to not only monitor what people are saying about you, but also monitor your competition, and that is called Google Alerts.
If you remember, you would go to, well, the very first thing you want to do in that episode, I'll let that episode talk about that episode. I mean, we go over how to monitor your name and all this stuff, but for this one, what you want to do is think of all the keywords. You want to make a list of all of your relevant keywords. Determine which keywords, which phrases are relevant to your business, including the industry that you're in, any of your competitors like your top for sure, three competitors, but any competitors beyond that that you may want to keep an eye on. Any products or services that you have that they have, if they have a signature service that they offer, write that down. What's the name of that? Hopefully you have signature services as well, and you have names for all of your services.
Write those down. If you want to write down key executives over there across the street or any of their key people, write that down, like their officers and all of that stuff. Basically, any other topics that may be important for you to stay informed about, then go to google.com/alert and we want to enter those keywords and those phrases into Google Alerts. Then choose how often you want to receive those alerts. Be it daily if you really want to be nosy, weekly or as it happens, do you know that you could say, Hey, Google, as soon as it goes down, I want an email, so as soon as they release anything online, as soon as the chamber says this about this person, as soon as whatever happens, I want an email, I'm waiting for them to come out with a text or delivery or something like that.
But anyway, they will send you an email. When any of this happens at the frequency that you set and you want to review these, make a habit of checking that email, checking that alert, that digest that they send you. This is going to help you stay on top of number one, industry trends.
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You can't be everywhere at all times, but this is the second best way to do it. You can monitor your competitors activity. What are they posting? If they're running some type of offer, maybe you don't want to run that same offer, but maybe you want to kind of put a little of your seasoning salt on it and make it something different, but what's going on over there? Because they have to market it. By the way, let me give you this one too. While we're talking about this Facebook ad library. If you have competitors that are marketing on Facebook, and I mean they're going to be able to see yours as well, because if they're listening to this and they know about this, but you can go to Facebook library, we'll put a link in the show notes and then type in the name of your competitor if they're running Facebook ads, and then you can see all of the ads that they're running and the pages that they're sending to, and this is just basically so you can have an idea of what's happening.
A lot of times you can go to someone in a different market than you. If you're looking for ideas, just go to Facebook library, go to someone in a different market, perhaps a bigger, a larger market, and see what they're running, see what the big boys and the national boys are running to so that you can position against them. But if there's an offer that is being running, that is being run in a different market that you like, you can use that as a basis to create an offer for you in your market. It's perhaps not the same offer, but you can definitely use it as inspiration that they're running this over in their market. Now, how do you know if that offer is working? Well, a clue is look at how long they've been running that. Now, they could just be dunces and just spinning their money, but you own a business or a high level in a business just like I am, and I know we are not going to just waste money on anything, let alone keeping an ad running that is not working.
So there is a clue on Facebook Library, but back to Google Alert, when you get this digest, take action. When you come across an alert that's particularly relevant or interesting to you, take action can, if you've got industry news, you can share that on social media or send it to your content writer, have them write a blog post about it or something like that. Position yourself as a thought leader, especially on LinkedIn if you have these alerts that are industry alerts, but also we're talking about your competitors right now, just you want to stay ab as much abreast of it as you can when they are running their promotions. If when things happen, perhaps you, perhaps you want to hire someone and poaching it, poaching happens. Let's not act like it doesn't usually every five years, these super duper, especially in SAAS companies for sure, but people get burnt out.
Executives get burnt out when they're at really gunning, running and gunning for a company that five year mark, you got to watch it with these VPs. But anyway, use all that for Google Alert. Not only don't not only use it for yourself, but use it for your competitors. That's what this is all about. All right, here's the thing. I don't know if you've heard about it, but if you've got someone on your team that you want them to have some help implementing all the strategies that we talk about, then head over to MainstreetMarketingCoach.com. It's a brand new coaching program that we've put together where yours truly would be consulting that person and teaching that person, and since it's just launched, we've got a really introductory offer going on right there. So next week, I am looking forward to seeing you, talking to you, actually not seeing you, but talking with you, and we're going to talk about, what I'm going to do is give you a review request email that we know converts. We've u used this for years to send to people to get testimonials. We've given this to our clients and it's coming up next week for you to steal, copy and deploy. All right, so do what you got to do. Hope you have a profitable week and weekend. We'll see you next week. Go own the block.

Speaker 3: We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show and visit LocalMarketMonopoly.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local market and own the block.