Many businesses are struggling to stay afloat in this day and age of technology and online trading. They spend a lot of money on promotion while overlooking one important factor: competitor analysis, which is required before you start promoting any product online. Do you understand how to properly analyze the content of competitors?

Competitive analysis is an important component of any business strategy. If you do not know who your competitors are, how to defeat them, or where to focus your efforts, you will not be able to understand which ones pose the greatest threat to your business. But using MkToolBox, you can fully deal with this issue.

Companies that conduct competitive analysis regularly and use it to develop a marketing strategy are at least half a step ahead of their competitors. Let’s find out what it is and how to do it properly.

What Is a Competitive Content Analysis?

Competitive analysis is the process of identifying and researching your competitors to gather information that will later become your competitive advantage. It must be carried out as part of market research. This is the only way to create an effective marketing strategy that will help steer your business ship in the right direction.

Why Do a Competitive Content Analysis?

Being competitive online today is more important than ever. Before making a purchase decision, the majority of consumers use the Internet to research products, services, or companies. According to the study, 90% of consumers read reviews about a business or brand before visiting it.

Furthermore, 88% of consumers believe that websites with positive online reviews are reputable and worth purchasing from. As a result, it is critical to monitor the content and strategies of your direct competitors.

You should regularly pay close attention to the following three key components of content marketing analysis:

Quality of the product/brand. The indicators of market share, the number of references to the brand in the media and reposts, and the volume of website traffic all influence the level of attention and awareness of your brand among your target audience;
Quality of the content. The number of likes, subscriptions, views, clicks, and reposts are digital indicators of how interesting or uninteresting your content is. This information helps to understand the direction of business development. To be popular, your content must be relevant, practical, and well-written. Fortunately, there are services such as Rated By Students that provide assistance with writing;
Quality of marketing tasks performance. When launching content marketing, you must clearly define the overall strategy: determine the average check, the level of your sales revenue, the advertising budget, margin, and target website conversion figures. This data will significantly help you advance your business.

How Do You Conduct a Competitive Content Analysis?

Let’s take a look at how to conduct a competitive analysis in just six steps.

1. Identify Competitors

Before you immerse yourself in a content marketing competitive analysis, you should first determine who your competitors are. Here is how you can do it:

Search for Key Queries in Incognito Mode

Enter popular user requests and determine which sites are at the top of the list;

Ask Active and Potential Customers

Learning customer opinion ensures that you correctly position yourself and do not overlook important but unseen competitors. Here are some key questions to get you started (you can tailor them to your specific field of interest):

What factors influenced your decision to purchase our goods or services?
What search terms did you employ?
Do you have any recommendations for businesses that provide services similar to ours?
What prompted you to think about them?
Have you come across any websites similar to ours?

It is also a good idea to ask customers about the criteria they used in their decision-making process and whether they compared you to competitors.

Conduct a Survey Among Sales Managers

Those people who work directly with customers can tell you a lot about their needs. Sales managers, for example, are always aware of which brands they must compete with in the process of increasing sales.

Check Ratings

You can look up different company ratings and see who comes out on top. There are also highly specialized ratings that cover only a specific niche.

2. Analyze the Competitor’s Website

Exploring competing sites will help you understand how to improve your resources. You can learn new techniques, examine unique solutions, and assess your advantages and disadvantages. To do that, choose three to five competitors and monitor the following aspects:

Assortment of products/services;
Cost (how they differ from your products);
Geographical coverage (sales regions);
Methods of communication with clients (email, instant messengers, phone);
Site content (whether the content was effective, informative, convincing, and competently written. You can use the best writing services to ensure that your content is no worse than your competitor’s);
Payment and delivery terms and conditions;
Availability of guarantees and loyalty programs;
Website usability;
Design;
The length of the sales cycle (the number of steps from first visit to purchase);
Availability of customer reviews pages/sections.

3. Watch Your Competitors’ Behaviour On Their Home Websites

The marketing strategy accurately reflects the competitor’s behavior on its website. For example, if a competitor employs content marketing, you will notice a well-organized blog or qualitatively filled sections of the site.

This will help you understand how your competitors position themselves, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Answer the following questions when evaluating competitive behaviour:

Is your competitor using the same marketing strategy as you?
Is a competitor’s website aimed at the same demographic groups as yours?
Have you ever visited their website or read their blog? Was it informative and beneficial?
Have you ever downloaded their books or attended one of their webinars?
Have you come across any interesting and useful information from this company on social media?
Have you ever received emails from this company? Were they instructive and useful?

4. Collect Customer Feedback on Your Site and Competitors’ Sites

Once you’ve decided on the main competitors, you should go back to the customers and get their perspective on how they see your website and the sites of your competitors. Because this can be a time-consuming process, you should consider compensating customers in exchange for their feedback (discounts, bonuses, etc.).

Customer surveys should focus on the following points:

What problem did you try to solve with our products?
How did you hear about our company?
What were the top five factors that influenced your choice of company?
Has anyone influenced your decision?
How was the decision made?
What compelled you to purchase from our website?

5. Learn What Works and What Does Not

Evaluate what your competitors are doing right and wrong. You can look at interesting ideas for more successful ones, and less successful ones will show you what not to do. You can, for example, analyze content on your competitors’ blogs and develop your topics based on it.

6. Promote Your Business as a One-Of-A-Kind

Once you have determined who your main competitors are, what their strategy is, and what they do well and wrong, you can create a redesign strategy for your site and give your website a strategic roadmap for success. Instead of simply copying the successful ideas of other people, analyze why they work and try to create your ones, tailored specifically to your product.

Conclusion

Competitive analysis is an important part of developing a well-thought-out marketing strategy. Nonetheless, completing it once and then forgetting about it is insufficient. It should be done regularly to determine if your company’s competitive position has changed.

By analyzing competitors, you can learn from the mistakes of others while saving your money. How about you? What else do you employ when conducting a content marketing competitive analysis?

Author’s Bio:

Max Mitchell is the latest alumnus of our content marketing department. He is very passionate about typing, creating complicated spreadsheets, and consuming an inhuman amount of caffeine. Nevertheless, he is also the creative type of individual who will always find a new perspective on topics of interest.