Improving Content Marketing Using Competitive Intelligence

In the current fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, for giving your overall Content Marketing Strategy an edge, it is somehow necessary to know what your competitors are doing. The relevance of your content, the deployment of attractive videos and images, the use of right keywords, the technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the website carrying your content and the provision of good backlinks are all crucial leading to the success of a Content Marketing strategy. However, when almost everyone is competing to secure the #1 position in the search engine results page, some will inevitably make it, and some won't. Moreover, it is impossible to guarantee a high ranking as many search engines like Google never reveal the list of SEO elements in their algorithms.

Understanding the term Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence refers to the process of gathering information and details about your arch competitors, along with their commercial environment. The entire process involves finding out what other business firms and companies in the market are doing, what challenges they are facing, their customer base, and several other crucial factors having an impact on their fortunes.

The Importance of Knowing your Competitors

While crafting a content marketing strategy to hit page one of the search rankings, developing competitive intelligence is particularly of utmost importance. By making yourselves familiar with what the competitors are looking forward to, it becomes comparatively simpler to understand how their content is succeeding or failing. There are numerous ways or methods for doing the same. Visiting their website is initially a good start for making it quite apparent why someone is doing well or not. Let's understand this with an example. If you visit your competitor's website and come across slow-loading pages, you have probably hit upon a technical SEO issue, which shall lower their website ranking and increase the bounce rate.
Besides, you should also pay due attention to how much content they are producing along with determining the level of its quality. This type of qualitative assessment will offer you some quick wins when it comes to evaluating your Marketing Strategy and examining what you should do and avoid.

Using Tools for Competitive Intelligence

Till now, we have mostly come across qualitative assessment; however, there are several ways of carrying out a quantitative assessment as well. Tools such as SpyFu, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo can be handy in assessing web pages and producing all sorts of relevant, useful, and engaging data. These tools are capable of carrying out keyword research on your competitors for showing the number of keywords they are using or targeting, which ones are successful in getting high rankings and engaging users, and tracking the strategies adopted. For instance, it may show results as one company has increased its keyword usage while another has reduced it. By observing the results to find out what has worked well for them and where they are lacking, you can learn what to adopt and avoid.

Consistently Applying your Knowledge

The best possible way of ensuring that you are making the most of this principle and correctly implementing it - lies in operating it as per every other part of your marketing strategy. For instance, your Social Media Strategy also involves observing which social media platforms your competitors are using and how well are they doing at linking the social media posts to their content, which helps in improving the level of engagement your potential customers will have with your posts. Hence, in terms of competitive intelligence, make sure not to compare apples with oranges. While crafting a style, the content writers must consider the buyer persona of the target audience and the circumstances in which they will be availing of your services.

Try to be more Innovative and Creative

Planning an effective strategy for content marketing is not only about copying the best tactics or practices of your competitors or putting in efforts to avoid the common errors they are making. Doing that alone refers to nothing else than just being reactive. Therefore, if you wish to be creative and innovative, think about some new ideas that others are yet to come up within their marketing strategy. With a well-defined content marketing strategy, you will always have a clear and significant advantage over your competitors. But, if you wish to step up your marketing game, competitor research is the need of the hour for having detailed knowledge about your competitors and emerging as a winner.


Ref-https://www.kerdasoftech.com/blog/improving-content-marketing-using-competitive-intelligence/