Basically, the competitive analysis of content marketing within your business aims to make your content and service unique on the market. It entails holding deep research on the industry market and exploring all industry-related content of your direct and indirect competitors. You need to know what they offer—the ranges of services or products, what selling and marketing strategies they follow, how many customers they have and their retention percentage, what reviews they mainly receive.
After all this information is collected, you are capable of defining the key differentiators for your content marketing and taking advantage of them.
Why Is Competitive Content Analysis a Must?
To make sure your marketing plan is relevant and is going to bring success to your business, an analysis of your actions is obliged. If you still hesitate, then we will provide the key reasons why you should obviously consider content marketing competitive analysis. Here it is:
- being aware of the effectiveness of your marketing campaign—compare the results from the previous months to the current situation to monitor the growth and development;
- detecting the weak sides—thanks to analysis, you will know what content needs changes to increase conversion;
- keeping your content relevant and standing out from the competitors.
Pro-tips on How to Perform Content Marketing Competitive Analysis
Before diving into the competitors’ content investigation, you have to clearly understand the aims and tasks you need to execute during this process. It can take a lot of working hours, but you need to stay concentrated on successful results.
Know Who Your Competitors Are
Competitor exploration has to be as deep as possible. Direct competitors are entire companies or single specialists that offer equal ranges of services or products like your company. Indirect competitors are even more dangerous than direct, as such companies propose services that are different from yours but can correlate to the demands of your target clients. The more companies you will find for analyzing, the more effective results you will receive. Of course, it depends on industry specifics as your specialization is quite narrow, then the research may not bring the result you expect.
Be Aware of What Content Your Competitors Write
You need to consider literally everything—all platforms where they publish their articles, the topics of posts and their sizes, what type of services they offer, what types of content they write, what and how many interacting elements they add. The process of content analysis is scalable and partially overwhelming. Do not be afraid to spend plenty of time on competitive content exploration, but focus on your initial goals and tasks. After all, information is collected, you can compare your current content planning and make adjustments if needed.
Consider the SEO Strategy of Your Competitors
The traffic and ranking of articles are defined by the SEO optimization of the content. To make the analysis more advanced, you need to explore the SEO action your competitors mostly prefer. To say a few words about what SEO includes:
- articles URLs
- length of titles
- number and length of heading and subheadings
- number of words, meta description, meta tags
- the structure of articles
- interacting elements
- alt text under images
- number of internal and external links
- texts of CTA, etc.
SEO also includes adding topic-related keywords, and their variety also matters. Each competitors’ articles can be easily checked via Google Analytics or Ahrefs to see what keywords work better, how much traffic and clicks the post has received.
Learn the Key Content Format
The demands of modern customers are changing and growing on a daily basis. Now they expect much more than reading a common article on the blog. They want to feel valuable to let you offer your services or products to them. When analyzing your competitors, learn what formats of content they most prefer. Along with blog articles, it can be:
- PDF industry or subject-related reports where all vital information is collected within one document;
- Webinars to familiarize people with their brands more deeply;
- Podcasts with the participation of famous personalities in the industry;
- Educative videos from company specialists;
- Survey and quizzes for diluting content.
All these tools are used to engage readers more and make them want to stay longer on the website.
Let’s Take a Close Look at CTA (Call-To-Action) Buttons
No blog article can deal without CTA buttons spread across the text. These buttons are responsible for enabling readers to take action and contact your company for further cooperation or making a purchase. CTA contains some little text compared to the entire article, but according to writing service BestWritersOnline, this piece of content is supposed to be the most important part of the article.
Check out what words and phrases your competitors used to enhance potential customers to fill in the contact form. Should it be a short expression that calls to action, or a long quote? Should CTA be added at the beginning, middle, or end of the post? Or should it look like a small note or a huge banner on your website page? You will be able to create working CTAs when you will find out the answers to these questions.
Find Out the Number of Content Specialists
To produce a certain amount of content per month, you need to hire a certain number of content specialists to execute your marketing plan. To avoid wasting time, money, and effort, find out the dependency of the amount of content to the number of employees according to your competitors.
Do you need to hire more Juniors to write more articles at low prices, or do you need to hire fewer but more experienced content writers producing high-quality content? Due to the custom writing service TrustMyPaper, your choice must be based on the market and competitors’ research to make the marketing strategy effective.
To conclude
Content marketing competitive analysis is a repetitive task that needs to be executed at least two-three times a year. After the information is gathered and processed, it is high time to create an action plan. Analytical data is not enough to implement changes in your marketing strategy. Based on the research, you have to write down a precise plan of the following steps you and your marketing team have to execute to make the content of higher quality.
The more qualitative your content is, the more probability to receive new customers you have. Your marketing strategy should correlate to the needs of your target audience and may require changes even every month. Your task is to quickly respond to these needs and demands.
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.
