The competitive content marketing analysis is one of the essentials of a marketing campaign. However, most businesses overlook its importance. No matter what your field of business is, there will always be authoritative websites excelling at their content marketing strategy. It would not be wise not to evaluate their content marketing strategy before creating your own.
There are numerous takeaways you can take from your competitor’s content marketing campaign, such as the preferences of your target audience, their motivations, popular content themes in your industry – and use them to empower yours.
A competitive content marketing analysis puts you into your target audience’s shoes and determines what they like the most. Understanding the preferences of your target audience is the basis of a successful content marketing strategy.
Here are the steps you can implement to do a competitive content marketing analysis to empower your marketing strategy.
1. Content marketing analysis: identify your competitors:-
One of the biggest mistakes we make is in identifying the correct competitors. You need not go after the leading businesses: understand the scale of your business and look for the matching competitors.
For example, if you own a medical blog, you need not compete with authoritative websites such as Medical News Today, Healthline, or Webmd. Your competition, in this case, would be businesses that are beginning to gain some popularity.
As your business scale, your competitors change. Always compete with websites with a higher authority than yours. By learning about the marketing strategy of different businesses, you can consistently improve and ensure the chronic growth of your website rankings.
2. Know the right tools and tactics:-
The best way to quickly get a taste of website content is through a sitemap. A sitemap is the arrangement of web content that essentializes easy navigation for website visitors and search engine crawlers. It saves you the time and effort of visiting every web page on a particular website.
Another way is to use tools to run a thorough audit of your competition website. ScreamingFrog is the best tool you can utilize for a website audit.
It enables you to access the attribute-specific data of your competition website. This includes page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, H1 and H2 tags, word count, and page length. It also allows you to check the indexability of your competition website.
Another content marketing tool that can help with your complete brand audit is Ahrefs. It enables you to go beyond technical elements and on-page content. Ahrefs allows you to access exclusive coverage to social networks, news sites, and blogs.
With Ahrefs, you can monitor the conversations surrounding your competing business, along with influencer and industry specialist opinions about it. It allows you to compare multiple brands on different perimeters to do thorough research and make the principal decision about your marketing strategy.
3. Evaluate their inventory:-
Inventory evaluation is one of the essentials for a successful competitive content marketing analysis. It is where you learn about the strategy of an established competitor and the tactics they used to attract your industry-specific audience.
However, it can take days, if not weeks, to evaluate the content inventory of an established competitor. You must know the right tools to analyze your competing website’s content inventory to save time.
One such tool is WooRank. It enables you to access a website’s content and compare it with another. Other things that WooRank help you analyze are as follows:
- Technical SEO
- Site performance and usability
- Backlink quality
- Social media content
- Keyword usage
This step involves analyzing all types of content your competitor created across different marketing channels and determining its particulars. The various content types you need to evaluate to have a thorough understanding of your competitors content marketing trends are as follows:
Web and social media content:-
The most important things to look for are the frequency and the length of the articles and videos your competitor uses across different marketing channels. This step involves the evaluation of the content published on the websites and social media platforms.
Another thing to look for is the perfect time to publish content. Publishing social media content at a particular time can significantly increase engagement. Analyze the time your competitors post across various platforms, find out what works best for them, and improvise learnings into your marketing strategy.
Pay attention to how your competitor is theming content across different platforms, and what their omnichannel marketing strategies are. These particulars will help you determine what works best for your target audience. Learning about their preference will help you direct your content marketing campaign to meet their specific requirements.
Leads and sales funnel:-
Other things to look for in your competitor’s content marketing analysis is leads and sales funnels. You must always have your business objectives in mind. Two of the most common business objectives are generating sales and leads of potential business prospects.
Pay attention to how your competitors drive consumers through a lead or the sales funnel. What is their model? How is there ROI? Examine the sales funnel of various competitors and choose the best one to be improvised in your content marketing strategy.
High quality paid content:-
Is your competitor creating high-quality exclusive content, such as webinars, guides, and e-books and selling them or using them to generate leads for their business? What is the frequency at which they are creating paid content? How much revenue are they generating?
These findings will assist you to be particular on whether to improvise paid content as a part of your marketing efforts or pass on it.
4. Tabulate the findings:-
Once you have analyzed the content on your competition website, it is time to tabulate it. Organizing different findings from your competitive analysis will help you establish particulars for your content marketing campaign.
Make sure to include the findings of each competitor in one table. Though the table below focuses mainly on quantity, frequency, and the quality of content, you can add other attributes you require for your specific content marketing strategy, such as the click-through rates and word count.
At this stage, you can be more specific about the findings of your competitive analysis. Here, you can determine the exact length of the post you need to create and other particulars, such as how often do you need to post? What is the best content theme? What tone does your target audience enjoys the most? Do you need to create paid content? What are the preferred platforms of your target audience?
Conclusion:-
The competition on the internet for the attention of a particular set of audiences has increased drastically. It has created a sense of urgency to do something new. Knowing your competitors’ strategies, you can determine what works best for your target audience. You’ll also learn about the mistakes you need to avoid to excel at your content marketing campaign.
Besides the benefits that it has to offer, most businesses overlook the importance of competitive content analysis. They begin to create content without being acquainted with the preferences of their target audience.
Beginning to create content without a competitive content marketing analysis is like going into the wild without navigation. But with it, you can lead your content marketing campaign.
