Expanding local businesses into new geographic markets requires a strategic approach grounded in comprehensive market intelligence, especially when the businesses rely heavily on local search to generate leads and drive business.
For local enterprise organizations, multi-location businesses, or SMBs looking to add service areas or brick-and-mortar locations, understanding local customer behaviors and preferences, competitive landscapes, and regional market trends is essential to making informed decisions and maximizing growth potential.
There are many tools you can use to gather market intelligence before expanding into a new area, but when it comes to local search there's none better than Local Falcon.
Benefits of Using Local Falcon for Market Intelligence
Local Falcon's unique rank tracking grid and reports provide enterprise and multi-location business users with highly accurate insights into the local search competition and opportunities in any given area they're considering expanding into.
These features allow business owners and marketers to understand a market before they jump into it, helping them make informed business decisions, tailor their local SEO strategies, and, ultimately, increase their chances of success in the new area — whether it be a new neighborhood, town, city, region, or anything in between.
How Local Falcon Provides Enterprise Market Intelligence:
- Provides highly accurate, hyper-local ranking data for enterprise expansion.
- Surveys potential locations for expansion using a proprietary rank tracking grid.
- Helps businesses make informed decisions and tailor local SEO strategies.
- Enables in-depth competitor analysis from multiple angles.
- Offers insights into competitors' local search rankings, geographic coverage, and social proof.
- Uses Share of Local Voice (SoLV) score to assess market overlap.
- Determines if a new market is an untapped opportunity or an area of self-competition (both can be good).
- Allows easy setup of scan grids to cover new market areas.
- Facilitates simultaneous scans for multiple locations and keywords.
- Falcon AI analyzes scan results and provides suggestions for how to outrank competitors.
- Falcon Assist offers additional market insights and market entry recommendations.
How To Use Local Falcon To Gather Market Intelligence: A Hypothetical Case Study
Let's say you're looking to expand a medium-sized roofing business based in Calgary, Alberta that currently only serves clients in Northwest and Northeast Calgary, and you want to start offering roofing services in the city center and Southwest Calgary.
In this scenario, you could start a Quick Scan, select your business location, and drag the center point of the scan to somewhere on the map southwest of your business.
Then, adjust the Map Scan Radius and Grid Size so the scan grid covers all of the new service area you're considering entering.
If you're not exactly sure of the service area you want to enter yet, start with a radius of 1 or 2 miles, which is a good standard for most urban areas.
You can (and should) run additional scans afterwards with different grid coverages to help you determine the specific area you want to expand into — this is exactly what gathering market intelligence with Local Falcon helps you do!
Next, you'll want to select a few different keywords to scan for, to evaluate the local search market for different important search terms.
Local Falcon's Suggested Keywords feature makes this easy by offering suggestions based on your Google Business Profile categories and other terms that people are using to find your business. You might also add other keywords based on specific services the business offers.
In our hypothetical case study, you might start by scanning for keywords like "roofing contractor," "residential roofing," and "commercial roofing," depending on your service offerings.
Once you're happy with all the settings, run the scan and analyze the Scan Report results to gain market intelligence insights from local search, especially when it comes to competitors and market overlap.
Pay special attention to the Share of Local Voice (SoLV) metric, which represents how often a business is showing up in the top three results on Google (Google's 3-Pack) in the scanned area (and at specific points on the map within the area).
Looking at the SoLV scores in the Scan Report for "roofing contractor," for example, might reveal that your Google Business Profile is actually appearing in the 3-Pack at a few specific points on the map near the border of Southwest Calgary and Northwest Calgary, showing that there is some market overlap with the new service area you're investigating.
Even though it means you would be competing with yourself in local search in those areas, this type of market overlap isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it means you can saturate and dominate the market at specific points in the middle by expanding into a new market a bit further south.
You should also look closely at the top competitors and their SoLV scores to assess the difficulty of entering a new market and succeeding in local search there for specific service-related keywords.
For instance, let's say the top two competitors on the Scan Report for "residential roofing" have SoLV scores of 79.59 and 57.14, and the following three competitors all have a SoLV score of 20.41.
This would show you that it could be difficult to surpass either of the top two competitors when you first enter the market, since they both have fairly high SoLV scores, but that you could potentially rank third overall by optimizing enough to earn a SoLV score of just 21, which isn't that high.
Another type of market intelligence you can gather with Local Falcon is related to social proof, more specifically Google Reviews.
Local Falcon provides review summaries and analysis, allowing you to compare competitors' reviews with your own and identify ways to get more positive reviews that could help you outrank competitors in local search (Google Reviews are a direct ranking factor).
For instance, you might see that the roofing competitor in third place in the rankings has an average review score of 4.8, but only has a total of 32 reviews, and that you have an average review score of 4.5 and 25 reviews.
This would tell you that you may be able to outrank the competitor in third place by getting a handful of 5-star reviews that would boost your overall review score and total number of reviews past theirs. You can then perform sentiment analysis on your own reviews to find ways to improve service to help you get those 5-star reviews.
Gathering Market Intelligence for Multi-Location Businesses with Local Falcon Campaigns
In the hypothetical case study above, we looked at using Local Falcon to gather market intelligence for a medium-sized business looking to expand into a new service area, but what about businesses that already have many different locations or service areas and want to expand even further?
You may be thinking that running individual scans for each location and service area across multiple keywords would be quite demanding and time consuming — and you'd be right. That's where Local Falcon Campaigns come to the rescue…
Campaigns allow you to group similar business locations together and run simultaneous scans for them using the same Scan Settings.
For instance, let's say you're considering expanding a multi-location plumbing business into additional areas, and the plumbing business currently has 10 locations, all in different cities with similar populations and densities.
In this case, you could create a new Campaign, add all 10 locations to the Campaign, and change the Map Scan Radius and Grid Size to cover the areas you want to expand into, which might be more outlying neighborhoods and suburbs in each of the cities the business operates in.
After you add all the business locations and update the scan grid coverage, add the keywords you want to scan for and update the scan frequency and scheduling settings.
For market research purposes, you probably want to set the frequency to "One Time," but remember you can also use Campaigns to schedule and automate recurring scans. This is great for tracking performance across locations as you enter new markets, since you can simply add new locations to existing campaigns to start tracking their local search performance!
Once you've chosen all the settings, you can run the Campaign immediately to get both aggregated and individual scan results for all the locations at once.
Local Falcon's Campaign Reports give you an overview of visibility across locations, combining the functionality of Keyword Reports, Location Reports, and Trend Reports. They also include individual scan details and links to the Scan Reports for each respective business location, which you should review separately for more in-depth insights and AI analysis, especially when it comes to competitors.
You can use the data generated for each business location from running a Campaign to help you prioritize expansion across multiple locations and areas for the best results.
For example, let's say that the Scan Reports for your multi-location plumbing business show that the competition is extremely high in half of the cities, but much lower in the other half. In this case, you could prioritize expanding in the less competitive cities first to make the most of your resources and get a better ROI.
As we already mentioned, you can then use Campaigns to automate rank tracking scans and track performance across multiple locations and service areas after entering new markets, helping you continue to optimize and tailor your local SEO efforts to each location and outrank competitors at a hyper-local level.
Conclusion
Utilizing Local Falcon for gathering market intelligence provides a strategic advantage for local businesses looking to expand into new geographic areas.
Whether you're a local enterprise, multi-location business, or SMB aiming to grow your service areas or locations, Local Falcon offers precise, hyper-local data that can help you optimize your market entry strategies.
Local Falcon's unique rank tracking grid, in-depth competitor analysis, and insights into market overlap and social proof equip you with the necessary tools to make informed decisions and improve your local SEO efforts.
By running targeted Map Scans or multi-location Campaigns and evaluating key metrics such as Share of Local Voice (SoLV) and Google Reviews, businesses can identify opportunities for market entry, saturation, and dominance.
Ultimately, Local Falcon is an invaluable tool for enterprises aiming to navigate the complexities of local search and market expansion. Its robust capabilities enable businesses to enter new local markets with confidence, backed by actionable insights and a clear understanding of the competitive landscape.
Try Local Falcon today to harness the power of local market intelligence and elevate your business growth to new heights!