To successfully promote a brand or product, you need to keep your finger on the pulse.
Competitor content marketing analysis allows you to quickly track trends and audience needs. When creating your own strategy, it will not be superfluous to find out what a competitor is doing successfully and what is not very good – it is always better to see someone else’s rake that you should not step on. The analysis includes three simple steps: plan, data collection, and debriefing, but what details should you pay attention to in each of them?
It is worth starting the analysis by determining who is in the competitive group. For example, one of my projects is related to the development of the employer brand in social networks. However, you need to understand that it makes no sense to analyze the content of all accounts in this niche. Since the brand belongs to FMCG, competitors must also belong to this industry, or be as close as possible to it. The explanation for this is extremely simple: If a person plans to work in a company that produces consumer goods, then he is unlikely to be initially interested in content for those who are focused on banking or audit.
The same rule applies to other industries. For example, for a project with cosmetics for women 35+, I analyzed the accounts of brands with similar products. This helped me to understand what content will be of interest to the audience. For example, it turned out that long explanations on how to use the tool correctly are not relevant to them. But they are happy to listen to the comments of professionals.
In the field of Digital, there is very high competition with a large number of agency tools and productions. In this market, the role of content marketing is higher than in many other industries, due to the peculiarity of the services provided. Since online products cannot be “touched”, one of the few ways to communicate their benefits to the target audience is through content. Successful digital agencies implement it at a fairly high level, so it would be difficult to develop a business in this area without looking at competitors.
Competitive analysis is carried out in several stages. First, I highlight the main competitors and industry leaders with the same services and similar positioning. Next, I form the second list of the leading companies providing related services. The digital sphere has many branches, and clients sometimes cooperate with several agencies at the same time, so it is important to look at other areas too.
The market is large, and the entry threshold is low, so there can be many competitors. To collect them, I use several sources – different rating agencies, also apps for consultants.
I conduct a fairly detailed analysis: I look at the formats, frequency of publications, topics, broadcast abstracts, platforms used, for example, the best WooCommerce plugins, the quality of texts and visual elements, the level of audience involvement, and the tone of search results for branded queries. Further, for each competitor, I form conclusions: disadvantages and advantages, unique features, and ideas that can be taken into account.
I collect all this in a table, the format of which depends on the needs. If further, based on the analysis, a general marketing strategy is formed and you need to understand the situation as a whole, columns with the name of a competitor, specialization, list of activities, and conclusions are enough. For narrower strategies, it makes sense to expand the table with appropriate points: for example, for PR, I separately indicate the media in which competitors are published, for SMM – the number of reactions to posts, for SEO – the keywords for which traffic comes to competitors, and also about Email marketing automation.
Based on content analysis, several things can be determined:
- Status compared to competitors: how far the company is behind or, conversely, ahead.
- Strategy: to be a leader, create content at the level of leading competitors or generally rebuild from the mainstream.
- KPIs that will allow you to achieve the goal: what content is needed to catch up or get ahead of competitors.
- Successful ideas that you can copy or transform for yourself. Content is the same bicycle, and it is not always necessary to invent a new one.
The easiest place to start is by counting all your competitor’s content links—just make a list. Then – to analyze how many people were there. On the site – is there a counter, what topics are raised, generate key queries – see in search engines who comes out first on requests. Social networks – run through an analytics service and see what the target audience likes and what did not work, if you present yoga studio software. In social networks – look at a set of open hashes, and make a list using this database. View content in volume (visual and text) – what is used, what to add to be unique. Surf reviews on social media. Become a secret client and go through the entire sales funnel, evaluate the speed of reaction, and all the goodies along the way. Add to the action plan what you like, and add what is not yet.
Content analysis of competitors’ social networks is carried out mainly in the following situations:
- When writing the content of a brand positioning strategy on social networks
- When deciding whether a brand should enter a specific social network
- Analysis of brand presence in social networks, adjustment of content strategy
Well, of course, I always subscribe to the main competitors and monitor market changes in real-time.
And one of the most important indicators is your comments, the fact that we noticed something unique in the social networks of competitors, and some tricks that you can be inspired by.
Content analysis of competitors’ social networks will help you create or adjust your own strategy for presence in social networks, rebuild positioning from the main messages of competitors, find non-standard free target audiences, make a decision on entering new social networks and evaluate the necessary resources for successful implementation of the strategy.
Final Thoughts
Social networks do not tolerate an “empty” and thoughtless presence, every day is a struggle for the attention and reaction of readers, which, with a properly written and implemented strategy, will be converted into audience loyalty and new customers.
