Outsmart Your Competition With Content Marketing

Everybody wants an edge.  And hey, everybody needs one. Small businesses launch and die too often. Even if you’re among the lucky ones that thrive, there are no guarantees for the future.

The best way to beat your competition hasn’t changed since business started. Just create a killer product or service, delight your customers, and do it all profitably. However, you’d be naïve to think that simply being good is enough to win in business.

Just ask Ned Stark from “Game of Thrones.”

You have to know what your competition is doing. It’s too easy to get blindsided otherwise. And, ideally, you need to beat them at their own game.

Content marketing is particularly well suited for this. Here’s why: Most of what works or doesn’t work in content marketing is public. Because of this, it’s easy to take all of your competitors’ successes and failures and leverage them for yourself. Here’s what you can learn about another company’s content marketing program:

• What they publish (both on their blog and anywhere else)

• How well what they publish does on social media

• Which keywords they rank for

• What they’re doing with pay-per-click advertising, which terms they bid on, what they pay for it, and their ad copy
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• Whether their social media following is growing or shrinking, and how engaged they are

• How their site performs

• Where their links are and when they got them

There’s more, but that’s probably enough to pique your interest. The point is that you can get a complete content marketing diagnostic on any competitor you want, then use that information to avoid their mistake s. Apply your time and resources to do more of what’s worked for them. If you do discover they are dominating one topic, niche or angle – learn how to side-step their strengths so you don’t compete with them head on.

Sound good? Let’s dive in.

How to find out what they’re publishing

First thing to do is to sign up for their newsletter or subscribe to their blog’s RSS feed. You may want to sign up under a personal email account to stay below their radar. Then make a folder in your inbox for each competitor you want to track. After that, follow them on every social media platform they’ve got a username on.

The next thing is to set up a few Google Alerts for their company name, top products, the names of key executives and any other term someone might use to refer to them. Google Alerts are free and take about 10 seconds each to set up; however, they won’t catch everything. If you use only Google Alerts, you’ll miss references from social media. So also set up a listening station on SocialMention.com or Mention.com
Social Mention screenshot

Social media monitoring tools provide real-time updates on social media mentions for the term “beef jerky.” (Credit: SocialMention.com screenshot)

See how well what they publish does on social media – and who’s sharing it

Go to BuzzSumo.com. Paste in your competitor’s website URL. You’ll get back a list of the top articles, infographics, videos and interviews they’ve published. You’ll also be able to see how many shares each piece of content got on the major social networks.

Best of all, you’ll be able to see who shared their content. These sharers are the influencers  we all talk so much about. Now that you know which content the influencers in your industry are interested in, follow them on Twitter for a while, and then tweet to let them know when you’ve published something they might like.