Keeping an eye on your competitor’s customer reviews is a helpful technique to find new customers for your business. That said, it’s more of a smart strategy than art, and must be done carefully and ethically.
Here are five ways to keep a check on your competitor’s customer reviews and use them to gain insights on how you can improve your business:
Monitor their blog comments.
While analyzing your competitors’ blog comments, you might come across several negative comments or unanswered questions. These comments can give you an insight into how your competitor responds to negative feedback from their customers. You can take some useful clues and use them while responding to negative reviews for your business.
Use Google Alerts to stay updated with brand mentions.
Google Alerts is a great tool to monitor online mentions. Set up alerts by mentioning your competitor’s product names, brand name, and the business owner’s full name. Google Alerts will immediately update you about positive or negative mentions as soon as they are posted anywhere on the web. This will include news articles, press releases, blogs and web pages.
Monitor local review sites.
When customers look for reviews of a brand, they typically visit two locations, review sites, and search engines. Online review management plays a crucial role in shaping a brand’s reputation on these platforms. If your competitors are not responding to negative customer feedback on review channels like Google reviews, they’re losing the chance to improve their reputation. Take this as an opportunity to respond to your customer reviews and enhance your online reputation. If your customers see that you are more responsive to their comments than your competitor, they are more likely to choose you.
Leverage competitive analysis tools.
To become a leader in your industry, you must understand your competitors’ inside out. By analyzing your competition, you can gain real-time access to their customer feedback. Birdeye’s comprehensive competitive analysis feature lets you get real-time competitive insights and explore opportunities by analyzing customer feedback from review sites using an algorithm. With this information, you can better position your services and products to seize market share.
Track your competitors on social media.
Social media is an excellent platform for listening to what customers are saying about your competitors, both positive and negative and using it to your advantage. Regularly check what your competitors are posting and how their customers are reacting to it. You can follow your competitor’s Twitter handle or like their Facebook page to stay in touch with all their updates.
You are now tracking the reviews of your competitors – what’s the next step?
Now that you are well-versed with what customers are saying about your competitors you can use these insights from the feedback to improve your online reputation. Here are a few things you can do to win an edge over your competitors:
Respond to your negative reviews.
During your research on your competitor’s negative customer feedback, you may have come across instances where your competitor abandoned the negative review and never responded to it. You may get the urge to respond to it and win that customer, but well, that’s not a good idea. Instead, focus on your negative customer reviews and see how you can transform a negative response to a positive experience for the upset customer. Avoid criticizing your competitor and contacting their customers directly.
Improve your customer service and products
Monitoring your competitors’ negative reviews can help you discover different reasons for the negative sentiment. Use this learning to improve your customer experience, your products, and services.
Enhance your presence on social media
To reach new customers, it is a good idea to build an impactful presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn where your competitors aren’t doing that well.
It is essential to understand that your competitors’ customers are your prospects. Learn from your competitors’ best practices and their mistakes to win their customers.
Before you go, check out our other article on the benefits of monitoring your competitors.
About the Author
Birdeye Staff Writer
Originally published
