Using alerts to improve marketing campaign performance

Alerts are a reverse search engine content retrieval system. They monitor the web for a specific keyword over time and provide timely updates on the use of that keyword in blogs, news websites, social websites and other forms of online content. Alerts can be vital for both the marketing planning process, as well as for the management of live campaigns.

How to use alerts for marketing

• Monitoring mentions of your company on the web (within third-party blogs, comments, social mentions or news)
• Discovering reputation management problems and dealing with them quickly... great for customer service issues.
• Keeping an eye on your personal name... or mentions of your team members publicly
• Competitive research: receiving real-time updates from your competition or mentions of the brand name of your competitors... Also works great for the @TwitterHandle of your competitor's brand name
• Monitoring brand keywords in real-time
• Receive news and updates on hot topics within your industry
• Inspiration: follow keywords that can provide insights for new content ideas. If your industry has specific keywords, you can use alerts to get new ideas for blog articles or whitepaper topics
• Spot intellectual property or trademark infringements
• Use root-level keywords to spot new long-tail variations

Why monitor brand keywords in real-time?

• Identify industry influencers: bloggers, competitors, thought-leaders, journalists and social media mavens
• Get content ideas for your brand blog
• Monitor new trends, concerns, issues or events for a particular keyword
• Spot the activity of prospects, leads or customers
• "Get the lay of the land" - Witness the total activity around a particular keyword to see how your content fit's in comparatively
• Improve the search impact of your landing pages by viewing alternative uses of the keyword in the marketplace. Identify variations for improving page titles, meta descriptions and other on-page SEO factors
• Discover long-tail keyword ideas for SEO with base keywords