It's Easy, You can Spy on Your Competitors Online Strategies

You see, observing your competitors' content is an essential step for brands who are looking at developing their content marketing strategy. For the simple reason that knowing what works for a competitor will assist your business gain insights regarding the type of content, your audience might respond to, including the understanding of the broader requirements and demands within their niche.

Luckily there are many tools available to marketing teams for digging deeper into content analytics and monitoring competitor strategies, and we know of a few ways that you can creatively keep an extra eye on the happing’s of on the field. Here goes:

1. How to Track Their Social Media Presence?

Keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to your competition's strategies by following them online. We reckon it would be wise to keep your notifications on for updates and amid various methods, you can also learn of the audience’s tone from their posts, through the imagery they use, and you can watch the effectiveness of their overall social media strategy. Remember to check which type of competitor content sees high volumes of engagement and take it from there.

It would also be smart to use tools to monitor a competitor’s social activity, for example, Rival IQ. With this tool, you can see the rate at which your competitors are gaining followers, including how often they post, how often they engagement and most importantly view their most successful posts.

2. Sign up for mailed

Records prove that 59% of marketers say that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. This is why it's essential that your marketing team should be monitoring their emails, especially the ones from competitors. It's never a bad idea to sign up to your competitor’s newsletter using an email address that is not associated with your orgnisation.

3. Classify the best keywords to target

Tools like Ahrefs aid marketing teams with monitoring their competitors by revealing data, and associated keywords, with regards to search volume, and the keyword profitability and difficulty for top-performing webpages.

In this way, you would know which keywords drive the most traffic.

4. Analyse top-performing content

What other way is there for brands to learn about their competitors' content strategy than by looking at their best-performing content?

Use a tool like Buzzsumo, this kind of tools are the best, and most straightforward metrics to evaluate this content.

Social Animal is another tool for dig deep into each article, showing main keywords, article length, total social shares, and more, and based on this insight; brands should then consider what distinguishes popular content, and identifying what makes it so attractive. For example, what questions or pain points does the blog post answer, and which keywords does it target? Why you might wonder? Well, because it can help you in developing new content topics and ideas.

5. How to analyse video content

Numerous brands have now included video as an integral part of their content marketing strategy.

So far, engagement has been a good indicator of digital content performance, and evaluate used target keywords and description, and document anything noteworthy. You should also consider subscribing to your competitors' YouTube channels to get alerts for new videos. Have a look to see which videos have the most views.

6. Monitor changes to a competitor’s site

You would need to know when a competitor launches a new product or service, and while tracking their approach to messaging while you are it. We cannot emphasise the importance of evaluating your competitor’s overall content experience. Look for detail, like the type of colours and fonts they apply? Alternatively, how their content is organised, and use this to give your audience a better experience.

It mainly because of the growing completion that brands should be more open to make changes to their content strategies in order to adapt to the marketplace because those that do so consistently will always be a step ahead.

7. Attend Your Completions' Webinars

Webinars take a more in-depth look into specific topics, and through signing up for a webinar, you will be able to take a look under the hood when it comes to the specific marketing angles your competitors utilise.

Webinars usually have a question-and-answer session at the end, so it’s essential to stick around to hear the audience’s questions.