Google My Business reviews are a gold mine for businesses. They’re a steady stream of localized reviews uncovering the best (and worst) of your market.
- What services do people praise?
- What are competitors doing to win customers?
- Which products delight consumers?
It’s all there for the taking.
However, getting those insights from your competitor reviews was hard work and time-consuming. Until now…
Continuing our series on Location Insights, in this blog we show you how Talkwalker has made gathering, and using, consumer insights, easy.
What is Location Insights?
We dived into Location Insights in our last blog, but simply put, it’s an easy way to gather your Google reviews into one platform for easy analysis.
By doing this, you can identify at local and global levels -
- Your overall performance
- Places where things are going right, or wrong
- Key topics driving positive or negative conversations
And set up Alerts to flag major issues before they hit the news.
You can also use Location Insights for competitor analysis (check out the best competitor analysis tools)
Track your competitor reviews
One unique point about Talkwalker Location Insights is that it’s also designed to monitor competitor reviews. While similar solutions are token-based, limiting you to monitoring your own business reviews, Talkwalker can crawl third-party reviews and add them to your analysis.
Having your competitors’ reviews at your fingertips opens up new insights that can help boost your brand strategy at a local level.
Learn what’s working for your competition
Location Insights is packed with widgets to help you understand your review data quickly.
The performance Score widget gives you a simple way to compare your performance against your competitors. Talkwalker Location Insights
The Performance Score widget combines qualitative and quantitative data, to rank stores. By combining your average rating and net sentiment, into one score, you can easily segment locations by performance. This helps you quickly identify area leaders.
- Excellent: score above 60
- Good: score between 20 and 60
- Neutral: score between -20 and 20
- Poor: score between -60 and -20
- Very Poor: score below -60
While the Sentiment Key Drivers widget reveals the main topics discussed in reviews, based on sentiment. This uncovers the key reasons consumers are raving (or complaining) about a store.
Sentiment Key Drivers uncover the main reasons consumers are loving or loathing each location. Talkwalker Location Insights
Use this info to find out what your competition is doing right, and how you can replicate this for your own success. It could cover be down to a wide range of reasons -
- Price
- Range of products
- Quality
- Customer Service
- Cleanliness
- Range of facilities
- Etc
These learnings can help you adapt stores at a local level to compete in the areas that matter most to consumers.
Discover where your brand is winning
You can use the same methodology to reveal the opposite. Where are your businesses outperforming the competition?
Look at categories where your competitors are weaker, and where you’re receiving positive reviews. But then don’t rest on your laurels.
If these areas are winning over customers, push harder on them. Focus on your plus points to encourage growth and to poach sales.
Better still, you can create targeted marketing campaigns focused on your wins. Use localized social media posts or ads to show off where you’re doing well. And for bonus points, you can include your best reviews in your marketing. Consumers love and trust social proof, so make the most of those great reviews.
Unwrap new opportunities
Competitor reviews are also beneficial when they’re not competitors. Yet.
This use case is ideal when you’re looking for new store locations. By looking at reviews from similar businesses in the area, you can find the perfect new location.
Look for reviews that focus on what’s missing. Are people already saying that X brand is not as good as yours? Or are consumers flagging certain ranges missing from their local stores?
Then you may have uncovered a gap that your business can fill.
In this case, you don’t even need to focus on businesses within the same industry. If you have a new location in mind, you can look at the reviews of all surrounding businesses to see if there are underlying issues within the area. These could include-
- Noisy area
- Antisocial behavior or crime issues
- Lack of parking or public transport
- Busy roads
- Anything else that could repel future consumers
Get more Location Insights
That’s just a taste of what you can do with Location Insights, but I’m sure there are more ways it can benefit your business. If a single view of all your Google My Business reviews, and competitor reviews, would help your business, then click below to learn more.
