Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Conducting a competitor content audit
After you use the tools to gather your competitor data, you'll be more easily able to do a bit of a content audit.
A content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on a part of or all of a website. In our case, we're going to look more at social content than anything else.
Issues to watch out for
When conducting an audit, consider the following:
- Top content: What content performs best? This includes the content that has the biggest reach, has the most engagement, likes, shares, and so on.
- Content mix: This refers to the media of the content, audio, video, image, text.
- Content strategy: This is who they're targeting with their content.
- Content frequency: This is how often they're posting their content to the different networks.
- Paid versus organic: It’s not always easy to tell the difference between the two, but you can usually tell if something has a high reach and lots of engagement or high reach versus low engagement. Most often, the content with high reach and low engagement is paid for.
- Anything that is out of the ordinary: For instance, if they have a bump in engagement over a period of time and it doesn't look paid for, how did they strike a nerve with the audience?
The role of Google Search
Take stock of the competitors’ content across their various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, blogs, newsletter, white papers, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Periscope, and more and more. Any and all properties they have should be looked at.
You’re trying to find out what their strategy is, who their audience is, and how well it's working. You can also find a lot of data you need to fill in the blanks through search. Through articles, interviews, and case studies, you can usually find the other information that you'll need, like budgets, tactics, and staff.
Sites like Contently do a lot of research and case studies on clients and non-clients that are quite revealing. Video search will also bring up interviews and presentations from members of your competitor's digital team where they'll often go into their own case studies revealing great information.
The role of Google alerts
In order to stay on top of news and events with your competitors, you can also set up an alert on Google News search where you can actually have anything new delivered to your inbox daily or weekly, as you prefer
Back to TopTara Hunt
Tara Hunt is an executive-level digital marketing professional with over 20 years of experience. She is the founder of Truly Inc., the author of one of the first books on how the social web is changing business, and a professional public speaker. Tara has created and executed proven digital and social strategies across multiple industries. She specializes in relationship and inbound marketing, with a passion for data-driven strategy.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
