As a marketer or business owner, Google Alerts are essential – especially for content marketing. Google Alerts is a free Google tool that sends you email alerts of the latest relevant results, based on the search terms you specify.
Why set up Google Alerts? Google Alerts provide content marketing ideas, competitive research, customer insight, and so much more. Once you start using Google Alerts, you may find that you simply can not do good content marketing without it!
Here are a Few Ways to Use Google Alerts to Your Marketing Advantage:
Blogging Ideas & Inspiration – Google alerts are great for brainstorming ideas for blog topics, especially when you find yourself stuck in writer’s block. Find out what people are saying on forums, blogs, news sites, and some social media sites about specific terms, people, or events to get your creative juices flowing.
Content to Share via Social Media – If you are not sure what to post on your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn page, look to your Google Alerts for inspiration. Google alerts can be a quick way to find content to share via your social media sites.
Personal & Competitive Insight – By setting up alerts for your company name, brand names, and your URL, you can find out what your customers, prospects, referrals sources, or industry insiders are saying about you – good or bad. This allows you to monitor your brand reputation and be able to act quickly. Setting up alerts that include your competitor’s brand names or company names may help you to keep tabs on what they are doing (or not doing) online.
Trends & Opportunities – Every niche or industry has trends that come and go. Keeping any eye on changes and trends can help you identify opportunities that could benefit your company in the future. Finding interesting content that is relevant to your industry could help you to find new people to follow on Twitter, blogs or articles to comment on or link to, or other ways to build relationships.
Now Go Set Up Your Alerts
Go to Google Alerts and enter the search phrase, name, or term that you want to monitor. Then let Google Alerts know how often you want the information delivered to you. How you fill out the drop down fields will really depend on your industry and how popular the search terms are (you will want to be as specific as possible). You may find after a week or two that you will want to tweak your time, how often you get the alerts, and your phrases, so that you get more or less information.
BONUS TIP
If you find that your Gmail Inbox is getting too cluttered with Google Alerts, set up an email filter that will send emails from [email protected] to a separate folder so all your Google alerts bypass the inbox and are organized in one spot.
