To successfully promote a brand or product, you must constantly keep your finger on the pulse of the market conditions. Competitive content marketing analysis will assist you in this endeavor. Learn how to effectively build a business with advice and ready-made strategies that focus on what matters.
Business success depends not only on the quality of the products provided but also on many related factors. A competitive content marketing analysis is one of the key factors one should consider and assess regularly. Let’s get a closer look at what it is and how to conduct it properly.
What Is a Competitive Content Marketing Analysis?
A competitive content marketing analysis is a comprehensive process that involves determining and assessing your competitors for gathering the data that may be useful for gaining a competitive advantage in the niche.
Why Do a Competitive Content Marketing Analysis?
A competitive content marketing analysis allows you to highlight the most important indicators (metrics) that you should pay attention to, as well as the tools that are worth using for that. It also allows you to quickly track your audience’s trends and needs.
When developing a content marketing strategy for your company, it is important to understand what your competitors are doing well and what is not working for them so well. As a result, you will avoid many mistakes and the loss of investment. Any analysis usually covers three basic stages:
- Planning;
- Data collection;
- Drawing conclusions.
It allows you to specify the following points:
- Your relevant position compared to competitors (how much the company is behind or ahead of them);
- Strategy: to be a leader, create content at the level of leading competitors, or even rebuild from the ground up;
- KPIs that will achieve the goal: what content you should use to catch up or get ahead of competitors;
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How to do a Content Marketing analysis?
It is worthwhile to begin the analysis by determining the members of the competitive group under study. For example, if you are working on a project involving clothes for older women, you should look into the accounts of brands that sell similar items.
This will assist you in determining what content will be appealing to an audience of this age. In terms of content, long descriptions should be avoided. Instead, it would be more effective to use the opinions of style experts, because their opinions can be decisive for the audience.
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1. Determine the primary competitors
A competitor is any company that solves the same problem as you in your target market. Find 3-5 relevant competitors (more will be unnecessary). You can do this in the following way:
- Keyword assessment. Every business owner is aware of at least one of his competitors. You can also use this information to identify the rest. To do this, enter your competitor’s domain into Ahrefs and look at the “Competing Domains” report. It displays websites that are ranked for the same keywords as your competitor. If you do not use Ahrefs, try searching Google for “related:competitor.com”;
- Check who uses ads. Finding companies that buy ads based on industry keywords is more reliable than analyzing organic traffic intersections. It reveals direct competitors. If you want to scale this approach, use the Ad History report in Ahrefs Keyword Analysis to view historical ad data in search of relevant keywords. There, you’ll find domains that have used keyword ads to lead to your niche.
2. Gather data for basic analysis
Knowing how a competitor appeared and learning the path of his growth can clarify many things. It is critical to understand what type of competitor you face, the scale of its development, capabilities, and finance.
Find out the following information:
- Year of establishment;
- Are there venture investors?
- Which brands do they own?
- The number of employees;
- The number of customers;
- The average income in the niche.
Data on the first three parameters, open-source company income reports, and prior-year statements, can be found on company review websites including Crunchbase and Yahoo Finance).
3. Analyze products and services
Understanding what your competitors offer and how the market reacts to it will allow you to gain a tangible competitive advantage. When developing a product, you should be guided by market requirements rather than blindly copying the products or services of your competitors.
At this point, you should gather the following information:
- Determine the functions of competitors’ products;
- Examine the price of the product and the availability of discounts;
- Availability of customer feedback;
- Examine the weak and strong points of competitors’ products.
4. Evaluate the overall performance of the competitor’s content
To move forward, you must broaden your coverage. Counting the number of articles that your main competitor publishes each week is not the most effective strategy. This behaviour will lead to a dead end sooner or later.
Examining various aspects of competitor content creation and promotion can be extremely beneficial. Here are some of the key points to consider here:
- The number of publications per month. This indicator will help you to understand the overall performance tendency of your competitors. However, it is meaningless without data on the effectiveness of these publications and user feedback;
- The average number of posts. The number of reposts is an important factor in the analysis of publications. This indicator speaks of the brand community: how active it is, whether the content distributed among users is relevant, and whether it reaches its target audience;
- The average number of obtained links. The number of links indicates how much and how effectively the brand invests in its content distribution strategy;
- The average amount of traffic attracted by publications. Traffic demonstrates the success of the competitor’s content marketing strategy. If there is some, the strategy was successful. If there is no traffic, it is likely that something was overlooked. You can use the Buzzsumo tool to gain a thorough understanding of this issue:
5. Consider their targeting and positioning
You must understand who your competitors sell to and how they want people and consumers to perceive their product and brand. It is the only way to properly position yourself to reach and attract the target segment that you are most interested in.
6. Take a look at the SEO key figures
An examination of key SEO indicators is also part of the competitor content analysis. As a result, you can identify potential gaps in your website’s content.
Check out the following points:
- Organic search traffic per month;
- Domain authority evaluation;
- Average time spent on the website;
- An approximate number of the competitor’s most popular keywords.
7. Examine competitor’s content
This step will assist you in identifying content marketing trends in your niche. It will also provide you with new ideas to improve your content marketing strategy. It involves the assessment of the following data:
- The key categories of content. It will assist you in learning about the most popular content topics in your field;
- The quality of blog content. To learn this, you will need to respond to many questions. For example, How specific are the messages? Is there a clear structure to the blog content? Does your competitor utilize high-quality images or designs? Is his content easy to read and understand? Are there any mistakes in the website content?;
- Length of content. Evaluating the average length of your competitors’ content will assist you in setting goals for your own one;
- Formats of key content. Compile a list of content formats used by your competitors (e.g., webinars, infographics, interactive content, reports, videos, podcasts, etc.);
- Tools used to attract a specific audience (use CTAs);
- Engagement of social media influencers. If your competitors promote content with social media influencers, make a list of their names and the type of content they create. You will almost certainly be able to contact them for cooperation as well;
- Learn about content distribution channels;
- Discover how competitors communicate with their audiences;
- Visit competitors’ social media profiles to see what content they share;
- Assess how often competitors post information;
- Determine which posts get the most shares, comments, and likes.
8. Turn your competitive content analysis into action
Once you have gathered all of the necessary content marketing data from your competitors, you must summarize how you can improve the content on your site. By analyzing your direct competitors, you can then apply the same process to your indirect competitors.
Conclusion
Competitive content marketing analysis aids in the creation and proper adjustment of your development strategy, the reconstruction of positioning from competitors’ main messages, and the discovery of non-standard free target audiences. It will assist you in making critical decisions about entering new areas of activity and assessing the resources needed for successful strategy implementation.
Examine and analyze your competitors’ content every quarter. This research will assist you in discovering new content ideas and evaluating your content’s effectiveness. What other ways do you use to analyze competitors’ content?
Author’s bio
Max Mitchell is the latest alumnus of our content marketing department. He is very passionate about typing, creating complicated spreadsheets, and consuming an inhuman amount of caffeine. Nevertheless, he is also the creative type of individual who will always find a new perspective on topics of interest.
