I can always rely on Hubspot to come up with some great insights and the article below was no exception. The article was slightly longer than usual but it is very comprehensive and covers a very important part of developing an overall content marketing strategy, the Competitor Analysis.
"When you ask marketers who their competitors are, they can rattle off a list quite quickly, and perhaps a few anecdotes about notable differentiators like product features, sales techniques, and site structure. Maybe they'd like to know more information about them (say, their marketing techniques?) but that information is all kept pretty hush hush. Right?"
An additional thought. One of the things in the article that wasn't covered was what if you find that your competitors happen to be bad content marketers?
In example, they rarely blog, they have no case studies and they are only marginally active on social networks. This sometimes happens in markets where the majority of the companies are in startup mode or where you are attacking a small portion of an enterprise or government market where a company is not concentrating its marketing. Think the early days of enterprise messaging/collaboration and a company like Yammer that chipped away at the now common collaboration space very successfully. They would probably have had little to write about because big enterprise software companies still thought that was just a feature of a much larger system.
So,what do you do to determine what content you should be writing about in order to lead the competition if you find yourself in those situations?
Well, probably the best way to do that is by looking at search terms to see what is bringing people to a site, both yours and your competitors. There are a number of search discovery tools that you can use on a site to see how it is being indexed etc. so even if additional marketing content is not being written you can get a sense of what is driving people to that particular site.
As well, if you've already started blogging about what you believe your customers are interested then check the top content draws on your site and continue producing content in those areas. You can also survey your early beta users and ask them about their main challenges and why they think your product is helping them overcome those challenges. These insights will provide you with a number of good ideas and themes to regularly produce content for marketing purposes.
Over time you will discover more ways and more customers that are being impacted by your product and you can just focus on those stories and solutions as you build out that content marketing process.
Check out Hubspot's free Ebook below as a good resource as well.
Thanks,
Ed
