Can I tell you a secret? Around one quarter of my content marketing strategy is directly informed by what my competitors are doing. It’s immensely helpful to watch their tactics and see how they work in a real time or historic context. All the information I need is at my fingertips, and I didn’t have to gather, curate or analyze it myself.
Using competitive marketing monitoring is the perfect way to help you to see what your audience (many of whom overlap with those competitors, big or small) are responding to. That then gives insight into their needs.
Create your competitive analysis summary
What is it that your customers are looking for right now? Do they have any questions that they are burning to have answered? Maybe you have some information that gives a different perspective on an element of the industry they hadn’t considered.
These are ways in which you can frame your content marketing strategy, part of which is going to come from your own research and labor. The rest will be readily available by watching your competitors and the people they are managing to target.
It is also possible to do your own monitoring through a manual process of curating data.
First, you will need to curate data about your competitor’s content by auditing all of their content, from blogs and podcasts, to videos and social media. Make sure you search for forms of content like webinars, white papers, ebooks and case studies, too.
Once you have a good selection of competitor content, categorize it by Competitor and state what kind of content they make, how often they post it, how much is currently available and the quality. Be sure to notice the finer