Content marketing competitive analysis is vital for boosting the efficiency of your marketing strategy. But what does such competitive analysis entail? Let’s take a closer look at its definition.
Basically, competitive analysis is the process of specifying and exploring your direct competitors in the market and industry in order to evaluate their products\services and compare them to yours. Such research requires thorough attention to details related to the variety of products, their qualities, business approaches and strategies, marketing techniques, and promotions. In addition, you need to investigate the internal process and workflows of your competitors that help them stay in-game.
What advantages can you take?
To ensure you that content marketing competitive analysis is pivotal, we have collected the core benefits such an approach can bring into your business development:
- being aware of the competitors, you can adjust your products and make them unique and better;
- researching relevant content, thanks to your competitors within the industry;
- following the unique and creative ways in your business strategies that make your business different.
So what steps do content marketing competitive analysis include? Here is a step-by-step guide to boosting your content marketing.
1. Know the characteristics of your target consumers
To know what direction you need to move and grow your business, foremost you need to define what exactly your target audience requires. The main aim of any business is to meet the demand of your new and regular customers, providing them with the expected quality products and qualities. Moreover, companies have to be ready to change if the customers expect that as well. What information has to be collected and analyzed? Here is the primary list:
- ranges of age
- approximate locations
- common problems and concerns of potential customers
- their preferences and requirements
- the value of your brand for them
The precise understanding of who your target audience is and what they need from cooperation with your business. Your main goal is to help them solve their problems using your products or services.
2. Take inventory of your competitors’ content
The next step is to explore all your direct and indirect competitors. It is not only about the company name, number of workers, and revenues. You need to dig much deeper. Your task is to explore all types of content and all possible platforms that your competitors use. In addition, you need to research the format and amount of content, the regularity of its posting, and so on. Here is the possible list of the content pieces that your competitors may write and publish:
- articles on website blogs which are posted regularly and according to a certain set of requirements like number of words, keywords, topics, etc.;
- podcasts are the same articles but recorded in a more convenient way so that people could listen to them on the go;
- digital books can contain extensive industry reports or other long read articles related to trendy topics;
- webinars or online tutorials that aim to educate customers about a particular subject;
- visual content (images and videos) is an inseparable piece of modern content marketing;
- online brand presentation available on the business websites.
More types of content you can find on custom writing service Topwritingreviews.
3. Explore the Company Structure
Before you start exploring the content of your competitors, we also recommend finding out about the team that actually writes and posts this content. The structure of the marketing team depends on the size of your company. You can start with two specialists—a marketing manager who can write content and an SEO specialist who can select keywords and promote this content.
As the company grows, the marketing team is expected to scale. You can hire content managers to write content, a marketing manager to create suitable marketing strategies, and an SEO engineer for other tasks.
To sum up:
- define the marketing teams structures of your direct competitors;
- analyze their occupations and efficacy of their task execution;
- create the perfect formula suitable for your business at the moment.
4. Specify the Topics of the Articles
After the content formats are specified, it is high time to take a close look at the content and its topics. Each topic of your next article has to be well-thought-out and approved due to your content marketing strategy, no random posts are recommended. Read as many articles as you and your team can to analyze the quality of the content of your competitors and find lacking sides to consider in your articles. This approach will help make the quality of your content improved.
Along with the main body of the article, headings, and subheadings are important to take into account as well as the structure of the articles, main titles, and descriptions.
All these elements are first to attract the attention of your readers and influence the level of conversion and the number of clicks within search engines.
The last point is to provide a competitive analysis of your current content and the articles of your competitors to detect strong sides and weak sides in order to turn them into advantages for your content marketing.
5. Evaluate and Compare Content Traffic
Marketing strategy requires regular monitoring of the results of its effectiveness, and it relates to all business industries. To execute this process, we recommend using popular analytical tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Analytics.
To provide competitive analysis, you can easily copy the URLs of your competitors and check their traffic, ranges of top keywords, and conversion. Therefore, you can compare the same topics of the articles filtering them by keywords, numbers of users, locations, clicks. These apps are quite simple to use, you can check the tutorials on the official websites.
6. Learn What Social Media Your Competitors Use
Online presence is a must for businesses of different specializations. Corporate websites, mobile applications, social media accounts — all these components are vital. And these components have to be obviously included in the content marketing competitive analysis for your brand.
You need to explore how your competitors support communication with their customers, what social networks they prefer, what call-to-action buttons they use, and what phrase they use within them.
The next step is to investigate all posts on the social media profiles of your competitors — visual content, links to website pages, advertising of social media accounts on the business website.
If you don’t know what social networks will be better for your business specifics, then we suggest comparing the effectiveness between different social media of your competitors, particularly Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Quora, Medium, and so on. Figure out the number of followers on each social media account, the regularity and formats of publications, number of likes, comments and shares, and more.
7. Explore SEO Strategy of the Main Competitors
Content marketing has to be SEO optimized, meaning containing core semantics suitable for the article subject. What does it provide? To engage your target audience, the content posted on your website and social media accounts has to contain keywords to be visible correctly in the search engines.
Along with SEO optimization, you need to explore the structure of particles of different sizes, the lengths of URLs and titles, visual and other interacting content, sizes of the pictures, number of CTAs, and so on. The quality of content is vital, but if the structure of the article is not usable and not readable, then your common users will likely skip the reading of the full text.
8. Add Call-to-Action Buttons Text
All articles on business websites as well as posts on social media accounts must contain call-to-action buttons. These buttons are responsible for enabling readers to make a purchase or use the services of your company. CTAs are small sentences that contain 3-7 words, but these words can be the most important within the entire article. We recommend exploring all possible formats of CTAs your competitors use. The list may include a button within and at the end of the article—detect what the difference is.
Each social media post also contains a CTA button in the way of a real button that leads to a certain link or the short sentence enabling people to follow the link to your business website.
Based on the experience of the best essay writing service reviews, the CTA consists of two parts—a short and clear message like “Get in touch” or “Get to know” and a longer sentence adding more details of your proposition.
To Conclude
Content marketing competitive analysis is the process that must be executed regularly in order to follow the latest content trends and implement changes in your content marketing strategy. What is the most important in this approach is to define the right following actions and plan of development for your company and turn these actions into life.
Content marketing competitive analysis will make your content more usable and qualitative for your regular and potential customers. As a result, your business will start to scale and be in high demand on the market, standing out from your main competitors.
Do you perform content marketing competitive analysis on a regular basis?
