There are several ways to monitor your competition’s content strategy. Monitoring competition involves analyzing their social media activity, blog post frequency and topics, email newsletters, and SEO strategies. Observing customer engagement and feedback on their content provides insights into what resonates with the audience. Additionally, tracking their backlink profiles and digital PR efforts can reveal their outreach strategies.
Knowing how to compete with other businesses in your niche is crucial, especially if you’re in a highly saturated niche. Content is one of the ways you can differentiate yourself because the more value you can provide to your readers and potential customers, the better off you are.
Here are six ways to monitor your competition’s content strategy so you can develop your content strategy based on what works.
Join their Email List
According to a survey, 59% of marketers say that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. As such, your marketing team needs to monitor the emails that your competitors are sending to their prospects and customers. Using a personal email address, subscribe to your competitor’s email marketing list.
With this approach, your marketing team can learn more about the company’s culture, seasonal campaigns, business news, types of content and frequency of publishing as well as how the competition addresses their target audience
Track Their Social Media
The majority of companies are now active across several social media platforms. This gives you an excellent opportunity to monitor and track what the competition is doing online. Use a personal account to follow them and turn on notifications for updates.
Pay attention to the tone of their posts, the imagery they use, and how effective their overall social media strategy is. If a particular type of content a competitor shares sees high levels of engagement, consider using a similar approach.
You can use a tool such as Rival IQ to monitor your competitor’s social activity. This tool helps you see how quickly your competition is gaining followers, how often they post, their most successful posts, and their average engagement rate.
Watch Their Webinars
61% of content marketers rely on webinars as part of their strategy. These webinars dig deeper into a particular topic and with this, Brands can find out what interests the competitors’ audience and the angles they take. Webinars generally use a question-and-answer session at the end so it’s important to stick around so you can hear the questions from the audience. Brands can then address those questions in their own content or even generate topics based on the information shared during the webinar.
While you can always attend these webinars live, you can also watch recordings of many of them if you can’t attend the actual event. Keep in mind, however, watching the recordings of older webinars may defeat the purpose of using it for competitive research. You may not get access to the recording if you don’t sign up to attend live.
Find Their Best Performing Content
You can also learn a lot about your competitor’s content strategy by taking a closer look at their best performing content. Social shares is one of the best and easiest metrics to evaluate this content. Tools like Buzzsumo, for example, make it easy to find and analyze top-performing blog post for any topic or competitor.
You can also use Social Animal to dig deeper into each article to see the main keywords, article links, total social shares and more.
Use the insights from these tools to consider what differentiates the popular content and what makes it so compelling. Think about the questions the content answers and the keywords it targets.
Taking time to review a competitor to the top-performing content and gathering insights about what attracts your audience to it can help your marketing team develop new content ideas and topics.
Track Website Changes
You should always take time to monitor the competitor’s blog or website for any major changes in messaging or design.
For instance, marketers must know if a competitor is launching a new product or service. Tracking their approach to messaging is also helpful. It’s important to evaluate your competitor’s overall content experience. What colors and fonts are they using on their website? How are they organizing their content? Is it easy for users to find information?
Brands need to be aware of how the competition is delivering content and make sure they can give their audience an even better user experience.
Subscribe to Their YouTube Channel
A recent study suggests that were are quickly approaching the time when 81% of consumer internet traffic will be video. As such, many brands are now including video as a crucial part of their content marketing strategy. Marketing teams need to know whether or not competitors are using video and look for interactions and engagement.
Engagement is a wonderful indicator of content performance. Check to see which website videos have the most views, evaluate the target keywords in the video title and description, and keep track of anything that’s noteworthy.
Just as you subscribe to their email list, it’s also a good idea to subscribe to your competitor’s YouTube channels in order to get alerts for new videos. (If they don’t have one, that’s a good thing for you!)
There are several ways your marketing team can monitor the competition. Keeping track of your competitor’s content is an essential part of developing your own content strategy that continues to grow and involved with your business.
As new competition enters the industry, brands have to be willing to make changes to their own strategies to adapt to the marketplace. Those that are able to consistently adapt will be able to stay ahead of the game.
