Competition in content marketing is big and often have unexpected effects. Competition is all about each party doing their part to achieve a common goal of becoming the best in their field.
At first, it may look a bit intimidating with huge competitions in the field, but once you get to know the benefits you will understand that a healthy bit of competition is somewhat beneficial for your organization.
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What are the advantages of doing competitor research about content marketing?
As Gianni Versace rightly put it, “It is nice to have valid competition; it pushes you to do better”.
It is a known thing that competitors can come in the path of your success, but it is always a learning experience.
If you can well understand the competitor’s strategy that is working and you use the idea to get better responses from your customers, you have this healthy competition to thank for.
Pablo Picasso was right in this direction, “Good artists copy, but great artists steal”.
Even big companies like Apple got their fair share of innovation from other companies to create history.
This all comes down how you can use the competitor’s brilliant strategies and make it more creative.
Innovation is all about using other’s strategies and implementing them perfectly. But, one should never copy.
Copying is not a solution and will make you always one step behind the competitor. Learn and innovate.
When it comes to content marketing, the philosophy remains the same.
There is cut-throat competition everywhere and you need to adapt to different strategies; even learning from the competitor’s behavior.
How to do competitor research about content marketing?
Let us look at some of the things that you can take advantage from your competitors about content marketing:
1. Finding new avenues for marketing
Venturing into a new market is not always easy and it takes a lot of thought and resources. But if you know that your competitor or someone similar from the industry is doing pretty well, you can certainly know that it is going to work.
For example, a leading beverage company has found through competitive analysis that there is a huge demand for specialty hot beverages, but the competitors, though they were having their presence, are not meeting the customer’s needs.
This shows that through competitive analysis you can always find ways to find and even improve on the new markets that your competitors are present.
Content marketing is no different and through competitive analysis, you can know a lot of new avenues for marketing. You can even learn how to tap these avenues perfectly.
2. Identify gaps in your content marketing
You cannot get these answers if you do not do an analysis of your competitor’s content on their website, blog, etc.
By looking at the content of your competitors, you can understand the gaps that are there in your content and how you can make it more interesting, resulting in better page traffic and lesser bounce rates.
Bad content or irrelevant content results in the failure to attract customers, and will probably end going to your competitor’s page.
This means losing money and if you want to regain those losses, you have to step up your content quality and get the competitive edge.
3. Learn to use social media the right way
If you are new to social media and are looking for content strategies, then you can look up to a competitor to gain insight into creating effective content.
There is a lot to learn from analyzing the response time and attitude while handling customers’ comments on social media networks.
You can also learn how to make use of popular scenarios to make great contents on popular sites like Facebook and Twitter.
For example, the famous Oreo ‘Dunk in the dark’ tweet made companies understand the effective and innovative use of a situation to garner lots of attention among the customers.
This also increased the brand’s image and makes it more visible.
Again, sometimes you can re-purpose competitor content to get ahead of the game whenever you are running short of ideas.
It will add a fresh twist and creativity to the same content and enhance the presentation value that comes along with.
Be aware of all the latest social media trends.
4. Get to learn new and effective keywords
This very effective if you are new to an industry and needs to get some effective keywords to work with your content. I have done this when I was a fresh graduate and I can say it worked out well.
If you know that your content can make well use of the keyword phrases, there is a great chance that it will generate better results than your competitor’s copy.
Following the latest blogging trends to put yourself ahead of your competitor.
5. Learn how content can be more engaging
Competitors can also teach you about the proper scheduling of content; when to post the attention-grabbing ones and how frequently it should be posted.
It is well known that there is a certain period during the day when people are more active on the internet and social media.
Thus from your competitor research about content marketing, you will know when the potential customers are more active and you can post accordingly. We have shared an extreme guide on creating successful brand on social media. It will help you to get more followers on your business page.
Know that it does not matter if you steal the strategies of your competitors as long as you maintain the quality.
Great content quality is always a winner and if you can provide better content to the customers, then you are far ahead of your competitors.
In the end, good competition pushes you to be better.