03 Dec How to Leverage a Competitor’s Content Marketing Strategy to Boost your Business

One of the critical steps when developing your content marketing strategy is to check out the competitor’s content marketing efforts. In discovering what the competitor does well, a brand can pinpoint the type of content that engages their ideal target audience.

Thankfully, there are a lot of analytic tools a marketing team can use to study a competitor’s content marketing strategy. Below are a few ways to gain insight into the competitor’s strategy and leverage it for your brand.

1. Subscribe to the Competitor’s Email List to Receive Updates

59% of marketers agree that emails are the most effective way to generate revenue according to a BtoB Magazine survey. As a result, your marketing team must pay close attention to the email content customers receive from the competitor. To do that, the brand should subscribe to the competitor’s email list using a personal email that is unrelated to the brand. 

From that email subscription, you can learn the competitor’s business culture, seasonal campaigns, types of content for the audience, the frequency of posts, and many more.

2. Analyze Video Content

It is not surprising that a lot of companies utilize video content in their marketing campaigns. According to a Cisco study for 2019, videos will be responsible for 81% of consumer traffic. Hence, the need to check if the competition is using video content. If yes, then ensure you analyze comments, interactions, shares, and views on various video posts.

The key indicator of a successful video post is engagement. As a result, you want to keep an eye on videos with the most views, the video title, target keywords, and description. Similarly, it is a good idea to subscribe to the competitor’s YouTube Channel to get notifications on new video posts.

3. Monitor Social Media Activity

It is rare to see a company brand that is not active on social media. It would be unwise not to take note of the competition’s social media impact across all platforms they use to engage potential customers. You can easily keep track of the competitor’s social media activity by following and having your notifications turned on for updates. By doing that, you can understand the type of post, tone, frequency, and post times that work for the target audience. You can always opt to apply a similar approach for posts that receive high engagement.

RivalIQ is a great tool you can use to track the competition’s social activity. You can determine the rate at which your competition gains followers, their engagement rate, frequency of posts, and successful posts.

4. Study the Best-Performing Content

To be the best in your industry, you have to study the best-performing social contents of the competition. The key metric to watch out for is social shares. In the absence of other metrics, stick to social shares.

Brands can make use of tools like Social Animal or Buzzsumo to analyze top-performing posts on any topic. These tools will provide a detailed analysis of article length, social share, keywords, and many more. You must understand what makes a popular content compelling. Questions like what keywords or answers are in a specific content piece will help you know the compelling factor of the content. Likewise, by thoroughly reviewing the best-performing content of the competition, you can understand what the audience prefers. With that understanding, your marketing team can create better content.

5. What are the Best Keywords to Target?

Using the right keyword is the difference between having your content appear in top search results online or disappearing into obscurity. One of the few ways to know the keywords your competitors are using, the search volume, and ratings on the keyword for top-performing content is to use Ahrefs. Another advantage of using Ahrefs’ tool is that it shows the competition on keywords.

Knowing the keywords that have low competition but high traffic potential, you can easily target them when creating new content for your brand.

6. Be Present at the Competition’s Webinar

The purpose of a webinar is to explore a topic in-depth. Hence, attending a webinar that your competitor is hosting is an excellent way to gain insights into your competitor’s interest. Also, the Content Marketing Institute reports that the majority (roughly 61%) of brand marketers incorporate webinars into their content marketing strategy.

Since the setup of a webinar is to have a question-and-answer session at the end, it is crucial to listen to the audience’s questions and observe how the competition answers them. There is an excellent chance the competition will use the content as an example and might share tips on how they develop content ideas.

7. Track Changes on the Competitor’s Website

The final step to leveraging the competition’s content marketing strategy for your business is tracking website changes. It is crucial to monitor any design or feature changes on your competitor’s website. Is a new copy or feature making customers use them more? Are customers having an overall better experience using the competitor’s service? Is their font and color theme better and easy on the eyes? It is not just essential to know how your competitor creates content; you have to understand how they present their content as well.

These are just a few tips to help you get a leg up on the competition and start generating your own “stand out” content.