Today, the landscape of content marketing has become more competitive, and every brand needs an edge over its competitors to survive.

Small businesses need an edge to thrive in the current competitive market, while large established brands need it to maintain the competitive advantage and continue to win new businesses. 

Having excellent products and exceptional customer services are just not enough anymore. You need to know what your competitors are doing and beat them on their own game, and content marketing can help you do that.

Businesses that integrate content marketing into their marketing strategy get better results. According to HubSpot, companies that blog consistently generate 55% more website visitors than companies that don’t.

Embracing content marketing and using these marketing techniques consistently can help you create quality content that outranks your competition.

Let’s get started:

1. Research

Find out what your competitors are publishing. You can follow them on all their social media channels. Sign up for their newsletters or set up Google Alerts so you can follow what they’re doing.

See how well their content is doing on social media by using search tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz. These search tools will help you to identify the following:

• The keywords your competitors rank for and their percentage of organic and paid traffic
• Content with a high number of links
• Content that has attracted the most links
• Content with the maximum number of shares across social media

Analyzing your competitor’s metrics will give you an insight into what your audience is interested in so you can create quality content that will help your business create more leads and ultimately sales.

2. Expand Your Pool of Content Creators

The role of your marketing team is to promote the brand and not to create all your content. Find a content community that understands your brand, audience, and your industry.

The content creation community will contribute ideas, formulate strategies, and create top-notch content to elevate your marketing goals.

3. Generating Unique Content Ideas

Some marketers find it hard to come up with new ideas, while others lack enough ideas to fuel their content creation. Content marketing is not only about your budget and the number of writers you have but also about the number of quality ideas your marketing team can generate consistently.

Lack of unique ideas results in stale, fluff, and repetitive content, which makes it hard for your audience to differentiate your brand from competitors. Find diverse authors and ideas. You can solicit ideas from sources such as internal employees, agency partners, or freelance writers.

4. Align Creativity with Tracking and Reporting

Metrics such as page views, conversion rates, and impressions play a vital role in content marketing. Give your content creation team the freedom to be creative in a way that aligns with the data and the analytics to help you rank higher than your rivals.

You can suggest a list of keywords to your writers but let them choose the topics and formats that best suit your content. Let your writers know what topics perform well to help them make decisions based on data and make them understand what resonates with your audience.

Are you looking for content that will set you apart from the competition? Contact Writers Horizon today for all your content marketing needs!