Uncovering shifts and changes with your competitors can help optimize and scale your content marketing program.
Every company needs an edge. With a competitor analysis specifically for content and social media, you can do just that.
If you do it correctly, you can gather significant insights that will help your content marketing program perform better. These insights can also help you avoid many of your competitors’ mistakes.
How can I analyze my competitors’ content marketing program?
At the most basic level, you can begin by looking at your competitors’ websites. It will give you an understanding of how they structure their websites and how they’re targeting their audiences. It can also tell you the content type they are producing.
If you want a deeper analysis, you can use tools and services like Alexa. A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Alexa will show you some of the keywords that they’re showing up on for SEO. The website also shows you other inbound link-related data.
Tempesta Media offers a similar competitive analysis solution. Our service is unique because it specifically analyzes both social media and the content marketing program of up to three competitors. We identify specific opportunities, gaps and threats. Unlike other solutions that merely provide the data, our competitor analysis service provides specific, actionable recommendations that you can immediately apply to your content marketing program with great effect.
What should you include in a competitor analysis?
Competitor analyses have several components. These depend on your objectives, competitor and industry.
For B2B-centric companies, competitive analyses should first start by identifying:
- The competitors.
- The areas where competitors are specifically focused with on their content marketing and social media program.
- Each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses versus your company.
- Where there are opportunities for your company to beat them.
At the end of the day, one of the major reasons why we conduct competitor analysis is to find a way to beat your competition and do things better.
How does analyzing my competitors’ content marketing program help me?
With an analysis of your competitors’ content marketing program, you can identify:
- What the competitors are doing right and where they can improve their program.
- Where competitors have gaps, so there’s potential for your company to go in and fill those gaps.
For example, if a competitor is only posting content once a week and they’re specifically focusing on one audience, you can boost your content and post more frequently. This drives more visitor engagement and search engine visibility.
You can also post content that better attracts that audience. The better you educate your audience on your company’s value proposition, the easier it will be to convert them from visitors into prospects.
Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ content to see how they are driving visitor engagement. As an example, research has shown that simply adding the estimated reading time at the beginning of the article can improve engagement metrics by up to 20%.
So, identifying where your competition is doing things right and where they’re doing it wrong will help you better optimize your content marketing program.
In summary
Every company does not compete in a vacuum. You have real competitors that are constantly developing and optimizing their content marketing campaigns to get a leg up on you. Perform a competitive analysis regularly, whether it be quarterly or semiannually, to ensure success. It can help you uncover competitor shifts and changes so that you can easily react and overcome them.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
