How can you use a competitive analysis to improve your content personalization?

Stand naked in front of a full body mirror with a laser pointer. Highlight every flaw, every day, until the tears flow. This month-long journey is your path to truly knowing your competition. Remember Mr. Miyagi’s wisdom: ‘To be better than your opponent, you must first understand yourself.’

Before you understand your competition and further analyse them, you need to be clear on your WHY. Your content is best strategised when you know WHY you’re strategising it. The sub questions involve asking yourself - What is it that you want to achieve with it? - Who are you catering to with your content? - Where would you want to show up the most? And finally follow it up with the HOW. How do you plan to do it?

A competitive analysis is less important to find out what your competition IS doing but more about what they AREN'T doing. Find the white space of content that you could own and be known for.

Measuring success can come at the most basic level: Declare that the simple making of the content, any content, is the success metric. Then proceed to the other goals. Making a piece of content is an achievable and successful outcome whether anyone is reached. I deal with this every day making content that very few people see, but I view the work of making it as an investment in continuous improvement, staying informed, and developing authority. It becomes more about the practice, less about the goals of an individual unit.

Make your goals personal and clear. People want to hear what makes your story special and what makes you unique in their life—that’s the best place to start. Everything else is gravy.

The idea is to find your content competitors, for this look beyond just businesses you compete with. Use Google, social media, and industry news to spot who's getting noticed by your audience. Pay attention to those making content that engages and earns trust from the people you're targeting.

We conduct competitive content analyses for potential clients quite regularly. One of the most striking moments in the process is when a business leader realizes what signals their website is sending vs. what they think it's doing--something that is easily revealed with an SEO analysis. That typically translates into conversations that go along the lines of "I know this isn't a business competitor, but this is who you're up against in search." From there, the most successful relationships tend to revolve around accepting that there are battles you can't win, and adapting your content plans accordingly.

In my experience, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with this statement as the competitor analysis (if conducted properly) provides all relevant data, including content types to look out for. For example, if your competitor is already ahead of you and you want to become number 1, it’s easier to assess their content channels and audiences rather than looking at several sources. They’ve already grabbed the attention of your ideal audience, therefore it would (or should) simply the process forward.

In social (espially LinkedIn), the algo is my competitor. Increasingly, understanding that ALL action is being recorded and contributing to what content I see, who is recommended as a potential new contact, and who sees mine. I'm increasingly careful to hone what I scroll past, comment on, react to, and with whom I DM. Clarifying that all action informs the competitor shapes future action decisions.

In my experience, conducting a competitive analysis for content personalization is a game-changer. Identifying competitors beyond traditional business rivals and delving into their content strategies offers valuable insights. Tools like Google and social media help pinpoint who is capturing your target audience's attention and trust. This information becomes a benchmark, allowing you to fine-tune your content strategy, address market gaps, and stay ahead of evolving trends. Regularly revisiting this analysis ensures ongoing relevance in a dynamic digital landscape.

Analyzing competitors' content is a bit crucial. We have to keep in mind that some content might work for them, but it won't for your brand. While analyzing content, the in-charge should keep in mind the page's uniqueness to better judge. For me, I take it as an inspiration but not a given. Each page is unique and has niche relevant audience.

It might feel like cheating to analyse your competitors content, but it can be challenging to be critical of our own approaches, especially if we're getting pulled into the weeds of detail. Analyzing your competitors' content in depth can provide useful insight to spotlight gaps in your own content and understand what resonates with your target audience. This can help you find new content ideas, and prioritise a strategy that focuses on your own strengths and avoids your competitors' weaknesses. In my own work, I find that regularly checking in with the ecosystem can help me to stretch my thinking, and it can help me to confirm my approaches.

This is a far too simplistic view of content that is increasingly taking many forms that aren't exclusively intended to create trust per se - rather just to create memorability and awareness. This question feels very transactional and mission driven resulting in a feeling in the reader of being used to achieve an end for the author. What about entertainment value? Is it funny? Does it inspire? Does it undermine? Speak truth to power?

By analyzing your competitors' content regularly, you'll be able to identify what they're doing right and what they are falling short of. This valuable insight will help you stay relevant and outperform industry standards, as well as provide you with an enormous opportunity to understand customers' sentiments and benchmark to measure your growth.

Not just their content can benefit you, but looking into their customer feedback to see if there could be specific differentiation points to leverage, pain-points you’re able to resolve and of course trying to outrank them on rating on a local level.

If we use a whitepaper as a popular example of content in the market, then targeting is a massive opportunity most producers are missing entirely. For example, making versions of the same content that speaks to specific industry verticals is a start. From there, identify and develop versions of content that speak to job function needs. Rarely will you find this. Content is almost always purpose built for horizontal industry consumption and for a single job function.

Like many experts have said here, you dont have to analyse your competitors to duplicate their strategy. You can use it as a vision board of what will happen if you take X,Y,Z steps. You are looking at the possibility of your future, do you like what you see? How can you improve it?

Go beyond benchmarking by focusing on personalization nuances. Explore how competitors adapt their content across various channels and customer touchpoints. Uncover the subtleties in tone, style, and delivery that contribute to a personalized user experience, and use these insights to refine your own strategy.

Study your competitors, not to imitate, but to understand what they're missing and how they connect with their audience. It's about finding the gaps in their approach and the unmet needs of their customers. Then, focus on those areas with laser precision in the content, personalizing it in a way that speaks directly to those unaddressed needs and desires. It's not just about being different; it's about being relevant and resonant in a way that others aren't.

The answer above could have fit here, I suppose, but if we're speaking to problem/solution oriented content, then being pragmatic about product is important here. Deep diving into HOW you go about solving the problem, not just that you solve it, is a good way to uncover the gaps and opportunities that exist between you and competitors. Use content to communicate those gaps and potential problems using alt solutions.

There are some great tools out there for building lookalike audience profiles--including the kinds of sites that your target personas prefer, the social accounts they follow, and even the KW variants they might use. All of that data is crucial for finding opportunities to not just personalize your content (there's little to no value in "Hi {name}"-style personalization), but to personalize the experience by meeting your ideal buyer at exactly the right point in their journey in the place where they're most likely to be receptive to your message (pro tip: that's probably not on your site).

I absolutely agree with this. What I found extremely helpful was identifying gaps which led to opportunities for content creation as well as potential product developments. It’s an ideal approach to solving those gaps your competitors aren’t fulfilling.

There are tools that let you do a full fledged competitive analysis based on the keywords gap and backlink gaps. Using these tools, especially for the keywords gap can be beneficial if you want to start ranking on SERP alongside them. Skycraper content technique work best in these scenarios as far as I'm concerned. Also, backlink analysis lets you know where the competition is getting their backlinks from which makes those websites a viable option for you as well to get the backlinks.

The proper interpretation of analytics informs so much here. With so many growth metrics measured across every social and content platform—it can sometimes be difficult to agree with your client that you've meaningfully moved the needle on their campaign. From the very outset of engagement, identify your key growth goals with the client (e.g. organic traffic growth at X% growth by campaign end). Do this before work gets sunk into the wrong places. While it's dangerous territory as a marketer to tie your value entirely to numbers, you also need some concrete, agreed-upon ways to show your performance to clients. Narrow the view to 2-3 metrics that truly matter to the business, then don't move those goalposts, unless the sky is falling!

Desde mi experiencia, los Test A/B son un métodos de experimento que se utilizan para entender, por ejemplo, si un tipo de contenido de e-mails es más relevante que otro. Si tenemos un segmento de 1.000 clientes con un grupo de prueba de 800 aleatorios que reciben un estímulo y 200 de control que no reciben, podemos revisar los niveles de conversión. Si la tasa de respuesta es de 30% en el GP versus 5% del GC, se concluiría que el estímulo es el adecuado y que la respuesta incremental es de un 25%. De ahí nace la importancia de implementar y medir en la gestión de contenidos. Si no se mide, no tiene oportunidad de mejora. Si no genera impacto, no funciona.

Incorporate a feedback loop that goes beyond traditional metrics. Encourage audience interaction and feedback, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your personalized content. This ongoing dialogue with your audience ensures continuous improvement and adaptation to evolving preferences.

On a granular level, it can be really useful to do an adjective audit as part of your competitive analysis. By extracting only the adjectives from your competitors and comparing them to your own, you can very quickly get a view of your positioning and tone of voice versus the competition.

Honestly, the best outcome of a competitive analysis is being able for you and your cross-functional partners to identify together your content’s unique selling points (USP) or points of view. Your audience should be able to immediately recognize your brand in your content. That and having a better understanding of the choices your competitors make compared to you.