Keep Your Competitors Close
Have you conducted a competitive content analysis for your brand? If you’re looking for opportunities that could help you grow, reviewing and analyzing your competitors’ content can give you insight.
Reviewing how your competitors are investing in content about their products or services can shine a light on your approach, and it might inspire you to reframe or emphasize newly discovered competitive advantages.
At Wilder2, our competitive analysis process begins with reviewing your competitors’ website content. This is the fastest way to analyze the effectiveness of their digital marketing strategies and tactics.
To help you get started with competitive analysis, we’re giving you the basic materials we use to begin our review. Access our Google Sheet and use the following questions to conduct your analysis.
We begin with the types of content your competitors create and publish:
- Do they have a blog?
- Are they creating whitepapers or eBooks?
- Do they post videos or webinars?
- Do they have a podcast?
- Are they using static visual content such as infographics?
- What about slide decks?
- Do they have a FAQs section?
- Are there featured articles?
- Do they post press releases?
- What about case studies?
- Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?
Next, we look at the quantity of published items in each category. Do they have dozens of blog posts or just a few? The volume of publications is critical to evaluating their outreach and engagement strategy. We also look at gaps between publishing dates.
After we examine quantity, we review the frequency with which your competitors publish their content assets. Are they publishing a new blog post each week or once a month? How often does a case study get released? The bottom line is, has your competitor invested in regularly publishing content?
We also evaluate the quality of their content. We coach our clients about striving for a balance between quality and quantity of content. Frequently posted, low-quality content, or; highly valuable content posted infrequently are both red flags. Most audiences seek quality, that’s easily found and regularly available. Like the lettuce section in your grocery store: keep it fresh, and rotate it regularly.
When analyzing the quality of your competitor’s content, here are some questions we ask:
- How accurate is their content?
- How in-depth does their content go?
- Are there spelling or grammatical errors?
- Is there a mix of introductory level and advanced topics?
- What tone do they use?
- Is the content formatted for easy readability?
- Is there a mix of free content available to anyone and do readers need to opt-in or subscribe to content?
Once we have a solid understanding of your competitor’s content marketing strategy, it’s time to find out if it’s truly working for them. We have a variety of proprietary digital tools we use to conduct this evaluation.
An easy way to get a baseline evaluation on your own is to subscribe to their newsletter, blog or other content delivery and see if/how they nurture you as a lead.
If they have an inbound platform to manage their lead generation, this should be relatively easy to see. An inbound platform allows a very high level of sophistication based on the lead’s actions. If they’ve deployed and developed this, you’ll quickly see how they’ve set up their lead generating strategies to convert leads to customers.
Of course, you may not have time or expertise for all that… Wilder2 can perform this work for you and your brand and review all your competitors, provide you with an analysis of your opportunities and advise you on how which inbound platforms are available to help you take advantage. We also assist in the development of high-quality content and implement the tools you need to measure and improve your lead generation and conversion.
To discuss a content audit with us… Click that button!
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