How Landscape & Paving Companies Can Monitor Their Local Competitors From A Phone
Keeping tabs on your competitors is a healthy business practice. The point is not to be worried about what your competitors are doing. It’s about staying informed of your marketplace and getting new ideas from others who serve it. It’s also about staying current with the opportunities and marketing messages your prospects and customers are being exposed to in relation to yours.
The challenge is – who has time to do regular competitive research? What’s needed is a quick, easy and automated way to stay on top of your local competition.
Enter Perch.
Perch is a FREE iPhone and Android app that let’s you:
- Find your local competitors
- See their activity on Yelp (local reviews), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and in online promotions.
- Create a watch lists of competitors which are constantly updated.
- Receive a daily or weekly email update showing your competitor’s latest activity.
How To Use Perch To Track Your Local Landscape & Paving Contractor Competitors:
- Install the iPhone or Android App on your phone
- Set up an account inside the app and add your business.
- Search the list of businesses it shows near yours. Depending on the name of your company, you may need to to use the “find other businesses by name” search box. Be sure to type in “landscaping” or related keywords to find other competitors.
- As you find competitors you want to monitor click the +watch button at top right to add them to your list.
- You can set your preferences to receive email updates about the competitors you’re watching in the settings.
Some Observations:
- Many landscape and pavement maintenance businesses are not very active on social media yet. I was surprised how few even have a Yelp account. (I recommend you get one for your business as it will significantly help your local search engine optimization).
- Perch is a new tool that undoubtedly has some glitches. It gets mapping data from Foursquare which is trying to build out its location data to match the depth of Google Maps. I think it has great potential, but still has a way to go. Since it’s free, you’ve got nothing to lose by checking it out.
- As more landscape and paving contractors will realize the marketing power of building a better online presence, I expect Perch to become more useful over time. More landscape and paving companies will have a Facebook page, Yelp account, upload images of their work on an Instagram account, etc… Why? Because prospects use the Internet to find and research landscape contractors. Your company’s online visibility and reputation is created from all the different, small channels it has a presence on. So a tool like Perch will keep increasing in value to you to monitor your own as well as competitors activity.
What Do You Think?
If you get a chance to check out Perch – It would be great to hear back from you in the comments. Meantime – here’s a video overview of the app. Enjoy!
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