Today, content marketing is playing a vast role in attracting the audience and promoting products or services. It is why it has become a necessity to understand how your competitors are using content to engage with new audiences and generating interest in their products and services.
It provides you with a new perspective of the marketing approach. Even businesses who are well-versed with content marketing do competitive content research to obtain an overview of the work of their competitors and stay updated with new trends. It is the new content seo strategy to capture the attention of your audience using content.
In this blog, you will get a clear overview of competitive content research and how to conduct it.
Table of Contents
What Is Competitive Content Research?
Competitive content research is the process of analyzing the content seo strategy of the competitors. It allows you to effortlessly cover the competitor’s top-performing content, its weak spot and determine your competitive advantages.
Reasons For Conducting A Competitive Content Research
There are several reasons to conduct competitive content research. However, the most fundamental objective to conduct the research include:
Measure Your Efforts
When you measure your content marketing efforts to that of your competitors, you will see the difference and obtain an idea of what type of content your target audience requires. It also provides you with information on how your competitors engage with their customers.
Maintain The Content
It provides you with some new and fresh ideas to write your content and ensures that you provide unique content to your audience.
Discover Content Gaps
It allows you to discover the gaps between your competitor’s top-performing and low-performing content. This way, you will effortlessly understand the needs of your audience and which or what type of content does not get much of the audience’s attraction.
Steps To Conduct A Competitive Content Research
Create A List Of Your Competitors
When you commence conducting competitive content research, begin with a list of both your direct and indirect competitors.
Here, your direct competitors are considered to be the brand, business, or website that offers similar products, services, or objectives as you do. Whereas, indirect competitors like the brand, business, or person providing distinct products and services but satisfying the needs of the audience you are targeting.
Another way for creating a list of competitors is to go through the magazines and blogs creating content on a topic similar to your brand. It not only provides you with quality content ideas but also allows you to build potential partnerships.
Analyze Your Competitor’s Content
Analyzing each and every content of your competitors provides you an insight into the investment required for the content, the type of format enjoyed by the audience, and the significance of keywords and topics. The type of content you need to look for include blog or articles, videos, audios, podcasts, webinars, e-books, presentations, and e-newsletters.
Estimate Content Quality And Quantity
After analyzing your competitor’s content, it is significant to estimate the quality and quantity of content the audience likes. Take a look at the media and platforms they are taking advantage of. Furthermore, consider the frequency of publishing the content. These channels or media offer some publicly visible markers of popularity and engagement. Creating content based on the current trends and acquiring comments, likes, and followers will give you an overview of how the content is doing in the market.
Tag And Analyze Content Topics
Now you need to go to the micro-level and analyze each content piece manually. This way, you get the opportunity of fulfilling the content gaps your competitor is ignoring.
When you are manually looking at each of the content, jot down their content’s title and description. It will assist you to create a spreadsheet of your competitors’ content marketing strategies that you can use to implement in your content marketing strategies. It will enable you to create a map and differentiate between your content marketing.
Conclusion
Now that you have researched each and every aspect of your competitors’ content marketing strategies, you can figure out the areas where your content needs to be optimized. It will help you to boost your content performance. Thus, you will be able to spend your resources more carefully and efficiently.
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