How do you identify and prioritize your e-commerce competitors for content marketing?

1 Define your goals

Before you start analyzing your competitors, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. What are your objectives, target audience, value proposition, and key performance indicators (KPIs)? Having a well-defined goal will help you focus your research and measure your progress.

2 Identify your competitors

To find out who your competitors are, you can use various tools and methods, such as searching for keywords related to your niche on search engines, using online platforms to compare websites in your industry, asking customers, suppliers, or industry experts for recommendations, and checking social media, forums, blogs, and online reviews for mentions of your competitors. You don't need to analyze every single competitor, but you should have a list of at least 10-15 relevant ones.

3 Categorize your competitors

Once you have a list of competitors, you need to categorize them according to their level of similarity and threat to your business. You can use a simple matrix like this one:

| Direct | Indirect |

| --- | --- |

| Competitors that offer the same products or services as you and target the same audience | Competitors that offer different products or services but target the same audience or solve the same problem |

| Example: If you sell organic coffee online, your direct competitors are other online stores that sell organic coffee | Example: If you sell organic coffee online, your indirect competitors are online stores that sell other types of coffee, tea, or beverages |

You should prioritize your analysis based on the category of your competitors. Direct competitors are the most important ones to study, as they pose the biggest threat and opportunity for your business.

4 Analyze your competitors' content

Now that you have categorized your competitors, you need to analyze their content marketing strategy. You want to find out what type of content they create, how they distribute it, and how they engage with their audience. To do this, consider questions such as what topics they cover and how they relate to their niche and audience, what formats they use and how they match their goals and platforms, how often they publish and update their content, and what channels they use to promote their content and how they optimize them for SEO and social media. Additionally, look into how they interact with their audience and what feedback they receive. To help you with this, you can use tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, or Moz to analyze your competitors' content performance and metrics.

5 Evaluate your competitors' strengths and weaknesses

By conducting a content analysis, you can evaluate your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. You want to identify what they are doing well and what they are missing or doing poorly. To do this, you can assess the quality, quantity, diversity, authority, and engagement of their content. Quality refers to how relevant, informative, engaging, and original their content is. Quantity looks at how much content they produce and how consistent they are. Diversity looks at how varied and balanced their content mix is and how well it suits their audience and platforms. Authority looks at how credible, trustworthy, and influential their content is and how well it ranks on search engines. Engagement looks at how much attention, interest, and action their content generates and how well it converts and retains customers. You can use a SWOT analysis to summarize your findings and compare your competitors.

6 Identify your content gaps and opportunities

The final step is to use your competitor analysis to identify your content gaps and opportunities. You want to find out where you can improve your content marketing strategy and how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. To do this, you can fill the gaps by creating content that your competitors are not covering or that you can do better than them. You can also leverage your unique value proposition and competitive advantage, exploit your competitors' flaws and mistakes, and anticipate the changing needs and preferences of your audience and industry. By following these steps, you can do a competitor analysis for e-commerce content marketing that will help you create a more effective and successful strategy.