Having a competitive spirit is an essential factor of any success story. But, you don’t have to treat all competitors as enemies of your business to become a leader in your field. You can follow their correct content marketing techniques and apply them to your business while avoiding pitfalls, so you don’t have to face similar failures again. You can choose to hate them or make the best use of them. It’s all about perspective.
But, before you start analyzing the performance of your competitors, you need to find out who your real competitors are. A comprehensive competitor analysis is a worthy task for any business. Simply being in the same industry doesn’t make the cut and will lead you to some irrelevant results that can later affect your future business decisions.
That’s why we have compiled nine key content marketing lessons you can learn from your competitors when you are analyzing their online content marketing data.
As the first step, it is really important to know who your audiences are and what kind of users your competitors are targeting. With a change in audience demographics, the types of content you produce and platforms to distribute them will have a significant impact on the outcome of your business.
While Google Analytics can provide a better understanding of your own web audience profiles, tools like SimilarWeb and Quantcast can give you unique audience insights into your competitors’ websites.
If you are more interested in analyzing social media audience of your competitors, you can start with free social media analytical tools like Followerwonk and ZohoSocial which can give you a detailed breakdown and comparison of follower demographics and follows of your competitors.
Regardless of different digital platforms, taking a look at the target market of your competitors can make you see new marketing opportunities from a different perspective.
Content identity is the voice of your business which can guide you through planning out your content structure to reach specific goals and core values of your business. Lack of personality in content marketing is something that can disappoint your readers.
While having a formal tone resonates with a company’s great reputation and is crucial for B2B marketing, a friendly personality that can be seen through content is more welcoming and approachable from a customer’s point of view.
If you are still indecisive of which persona your business should project, have a look at two companies from your industry with two very different voices. From that, you can learn whose content resonates more with their audiences’ preference and whose doesn’t.
At the same time, compare these outcomes with your core business values to find that inner voice that you are looking for your company.
Content Marketing is not just about written blog posts. Whether you are creating, curating or repurposing the content backbone, there is a wide range of content types to play around with, such as videos, podcasts, infographics, e-books, Gifs, and many more. Deciding on which one to produce depends primarily on your marketing goals and the availability of resources.
Yes, big companies have a dedicated creative team to create different types of content that are complementary to the posts and channels they are using. If you don’t have a big budget or professional skill sets like your competitors, that’s ok too!
There are several beginner-friendly tools that can speed up your content creation. For image editing, tools like Canva and Piktochart can help you create professional-looking visuals from scratch. For those who want to focus on producing BuzzFeed-like video content, wave.video and lumen5 are easy ones to start with.
If you are looking for some brilliant content types to keep your readers entertained, this content marketing matrix from Smart Insights might be able to help you out:
And for the best iGaming content and online casino translations, you can always reach out to our experts at Translation Royale who will assist you with creating content that converts. Slot reviews, bookmaker reviews, iGaming marketing campaigns or sports reviews are content types you should get handled by a writing service with years of expertise.
As Hootsuite explained, content curation is “adding your voice (and value) to a handpicked collection of content. Gathered from a variety of sources, around a specific topic, that you publish and share with your fans. Wherever they may be.”
Yes, it is amazing to create your own content, but there is so much valuable content from your competitors or other industry leaders that is worth sharing with your audience. Of course, you must never forget to give credit to where it is due. That’s the ultimate rule here.
There is no need to feel intimidated for sharing someone else’s work; in fact, it is even beneficial for you. By creating more visibility for content created by people from the same industry, who wouldn’t be thankful for it? You’d probably want the same too.
By keeping your friends close but your competitors (nope, they are not enemies) even closer, this will broaden your business network and create connections with other top industry players.
Your audience will also think that you are informative and an expert in your industry.
“Content curation is adding your voice (and value) to a handpicked collection of content. Gathered from a variety of sources, around a specific topic, that you publish and share with your fans. Wherever they may be.”
– Hootsuite
If you have a roadblock with producing new content, your competitors’ blogs are some of the best places to dig in great content ideas. No, we are not talking about copying someone else’s work. Nope! We are talking about looking for resources to ignite your creativity.
Often, you will come across good quality content or relevant topics that are worth adding to your content backlog. But it doesn’t always have to be another blog post with the exact same information.
Maybe you can extract data from an article and turn them into an infographic or dive deep into one of the topics and create an ebook. If your audiences love visual content, you can even create slideshows or videos to make it even more fun! The trick here is to remold the existing content with a sprinkle of magic powder to make it more engaging than it already was.
To give you an example, here is a repurposed infographic we have created for our article A Brief History of IT Localization.
If you want to learn more about content repurposing, do check out our article 9 Simple Ways to Repurpose Your iGaming Content where you will learn how to remold your old content into several new content types without having to create a new one.
Each channel provides unique ways to promote your content and outcomes might differ depending on the industry or audience. In order to successfully distribute content, you need to have a mix of own, earn, and paid media to extend your content’s reach.
For example, online casinos might have their own blogs and social media networks to promote content organically, but their content marketing strategies don’t stop there. Some also rely heavily on paid affiliate content marketing or invest in paid advertising to create better exposure for their valuable content.
Affiliates, on the other hand, might focus on populating their blogs with some specific keywords and sponsored content to drive traffic to their clients’ websites.
On top of that, since being up-to-date is one of the most critical success factors in the online gambling industry, you might find a lot of online sportsbooks and betting sites using social media sites, especially Twitter, to deliver real-time information to their audiences.
Take a look at this matrix graph from Smart Insights to get a very clear understanding of the type of channels that can be used to deliver the best outcome for your business.
One of the many factors that determine the success of an online content marketing strategy is the frequency of publishing.
Not because there is a magic number to measure success, but because the more frequently you publish your posts, the more noticeable you are to your customers. Not only that, as we have mentioned before in our article about keeping your content fresh, every new page you create on your website along with new backlinks gained from other channels/pages acts as freshness signals which will help you a ton in boosting your search engine ranking.
That is why it is worth looking into the content publishing schedules of companies that are on top of their content marketing game. This includes the frequency of blogs, email newsletters to social media posts.
By preparing a similar content schedule instead of starting from scratch, you know how much you should be publishing to be on the same level as your competitors, if not more.
Oh, yes! Localization – the key to capturing your target market’s attention. Like we have mentioned at the start, if you understand the demographics of your audience along with trends and preferences in that region well enough, you can strategically plan out your localization strategy.
Honestly speaking, there is a very high chance that top industry players might already have localized websites, blogs and even social media channels dedicated to each of their customer segments. That’s because they understand the value of creating personalized connections with customers by communicating in their languages.
When you study your competitors’ localization strategies, do look out for languages, local culture, type of content, as well as writing formats that might be helpful for your future reference.
In order to improve your search engine ranking, you first need to know how big the ranking gap is between you and the other competitors. Try googling yourself and your competitors to check who is outranking who in organic search results. If your competition appears above you in the results, then it’s time to step up your SEO strategies. You can blame it on the behavior of internet users, but It is only the first few pages that matter at the end of the day.
“The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google. Page 1 of Google captures a whopping 95% of all traffic. The top result on page 1 of Google receives about 32.5% of the overall traffic; the second entry receives 17.6%, while the 7th entry on page 1 of Google sees only 3.5%.”
First of all, you need to create compelling pieces of content that are SEO-friendly and carefully craft relevant keywords to cut off the SEO competition. Use either free keyword research tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest or paid tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs to get in-depth insights of which keywords your competitors are trying to rank and how easy or difficult it is to outrank them.
At the same time, if you are not satisfied with your organic search results, perhaps try running PPC campaigns to outrank the same keywords that your competitors are working on.
As you can see, having a healthy competition is a brilliant way to grow your business and improve the quality of work you deliver. While weak competitors can be advantages for your business, you can learn various techniques from strong competitors who are already ahead in the content marketing game.
Once you have become a legend in your own field, other people can also learn a thing or two from you too one day!
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How did you like May Thawdar Oo’s blog post? Let us know in the comments if you have anything to add, have another content idea for iGaming blog posts, or just want to say “hello.” 🙂
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