THE BENEFITS OF COMPETITOR RESEARCH

Competitor research and analysis can provide a better understanding of the marketplace conditions in your industry, leading to the creation of a marketing strategy or refinement and optimization of previous strategies. Ultimately, this research can lead to a higher ROI.

At a high level, this research is important when creating or revamping your company’s messaging. Assessing your competitors’ messaging can include looking into pricing, features, and services offered, as well as values and benefits. It also can aid in determining the correct target audience. At a lower level, competitor research can influence how you create and format your website’s landing pages, what topics to focus on in email marketing, and so much more.

As we mentioned in our article Utilizing Data Insights to Create Better Content, data can help direct your content marketing strategies, along with many other areas of marketing. While data is so influential, it can also be very overwhelming.

Marketers are facing the following challenges:

• Failing to set long-term goals. Long-term goals are imperative for data analysis. Since there is so much data available, marketers need to be wise and focus on the metrics that matter to the KPIs at hand.
• Being too impulsive and changing course too quickly. Analytics take time. Marketers must look at trends more so than exact numbers from one campaign or piece of campaign. Don’t give up too quickly! Results aren’t immediate and frequency and consistency can greatly impact your metrics.
• Assuming characteristics about audience segments that are incorrect. While marketers often need to assume something about their audience segments, if your assumption is proven wrong by the data, make sure to act accordingly.
• Failing to assess other variables. Data reports don’t always give marketers the full story. Although a campaign may do poorly against your standards, this may not actually be the campaign or marketers’ direct fault. There are so many other variables that marketers cannot control (i.e. other events going on in the world and user’s daily life events).
• Lacking acknowledgement of data inaccuracies. 1) Marketers must pay attention as much as possible, even when on auto-pilot for a successful campaign. 2) Understand the tools that they are using to collect data and more specifically, understand what the metrics mean relative to that tool and channel (i.e. social media platform, website, email).
• Forgetting to think like a human. Data is incredibly helpful, but only when insights can be gathered from it, applicable to the selected KPIs. When in doubt, remember to think through what the data actually means and how it can be applied to improve the overall marketing strategy.

WHAT IS A DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY?

A data-driven content marketing strategy uses data to inform and alter the content strategy. This involves capturing and analyzing data at all stages of planning, creating, evaluating, and designing for analysis. Depending on what type of data you compile and care about, once analyzed it can help influence which channels (email, website, social media) to post on, what specific content should be posted on each channel, what audience segment should be targeted, and much more. Some data can even help dictate page structure, word count, and tone of voice.

Overall, this type of content marketing strategy helps to bridge the gap between a marketing expert’s thoughts and suggestions and a user’s wants. By using data to create better content, you can boost traffic to your channels, improve your conversions, and ultimately increase your ROI.