#Every SEO Should Aim For This Link-Earning Stack
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nummero123 · 2 years ago
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Every SEO Should Aim For This Link-Earning Stack
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When it involves SEO and trying to enhance the optimization of an internet site,
server header status codes shouldn't be overlooked.
they will both improve and severely damage your onsite SEO.
Therefore it’s vital that program optimizers understand
how they work and the way they will be interpreted by search engines like Google and Bing.
How Header Server Status Codes are Served Up
When a user requests a URL from their website, the server on which your website is hosted,
the server will return a header server status code.
Ideally, the server should return a ‘200 OK’ status code to tell
the browser that everything is okay with the page and therefore the page exists within the requested location.
This status code also comes with additional information which incorporates
HTML code that the user’s browser uses to present
the page content, images, and video accordingly because the website owner has defined it.
The above status code typically only served up when there are not any server-side issues with a specific page.
Other codes may be served up
and which give information on the availability of a particular page and whether it even exists or not.
Below we outline the desirable status codes and people who are more detrimental to your SEO efforts and website rankings.
Desirable Server Status Codes
Status Code: 200 OK –
The 200 OK status code confirms that the webpage exists and is in a position to be served up OK for the asking.
this is often the foremost desirable status code you'll see when analyzing an internet site for SEO.
The 200 status code positively interpreted by the search engines,
informing them that the page exists within
the requested location and there are not any issues with resources not being available for the page.
Status Code: 301 Moved Permanently –
this is often usually wont to show that a page is no longer at the requested location and has permanently moved to a different location.
301s the foremost assured way of informing both users and search engines
that page content has moved to a special URL permanently.
The permanency of this point of URL means search engines like Google will transfer any rankings and link weight and link authority permanently to a replacement
URL It also will help the search engines know to get rid of the old URL from their indexes and replace them with the new URL.
Detrimental Server Status Codes
Status Code: 500 Internal Server Error –
This status code may be a general server status error that indicates to both visitors and search engines
that the website web server features a problem.
If this code regularly occurs then this not only appears negatively to visitors and makes your website experience poor,
but it also conveys an equivalent message to look engines,
and any ranking you've got or may have had are going to  greatly reduced within the program rankings.
Status Code: 302 Found –
This code usually utilized in temporary redirection or URLs.
meant to define where a URL  temporarily redirecting to a different location
but  probably going to vary in the future or switched to a 301 permanent redirect.
Often 302 temporary redirects employed by mistake, rather than 301 redirects.
this will mean that page content given less preference
because the search engines think the URL or content could change
and isn't as fixed for users as a page that has  permanently redirected.
Traditionally, this status code also doesn't pass link authority
and may cause links to de-indexed in time. generally,  
advised to not use this sort of redirect unless an internet site is fresh and has little link authority anyway,
or in very specific special cases where it's going to add up to only te
mporarily redirect URLs.
Status Code: 404 Not Found –
This server status code means the requested URL has not found and there's usually a message on-page saying
“The page or file you're trying to access doesn’t exist”. the matter with 404’s
if they're appearing for URLs that previously did exist then search engines
will interpret them because the page has moved or removed.
As a result, the pages will quickly  de-indexed
as they serve little content and any link authority remains on the Not Found URL.
The simplest solution if you���re experiencing many 404’s is to review
them and check out and re-direct any relevant URLs to corresponding matching or similar URLs.
Google Webmaster Tools often produces a report showing 404s
that Google’s bots are finding,
allowing users to map out 301 permanent redirections to the foremost related
URLs and thus expire any link weight and rankings that  previously held.
Conclusion
webmasters and SEOs must use 301 redirects to resolve
any URLs which are throwing up 500, 302, or 404 server status codes.
Search engines won’t rank URLs that don't permanently resolve to a relevant
URL so it's worth taking the time to review and resolve your URLs.
you'll use data and tools like Google Webmaster Tools,
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool to seek out erroneous status codes and resolve them.
For the best internet marketing services get in touch with nummero
we are the best digital marketing company in Bangalore.
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mediamoraseo · 2 years ago
Text
Advantages of Being a Full-Stack Digital Marketer
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A Full Stack Marketer doesn’t have a weakness. They are flexible and adaptable, and have as many as 20 sets of skills. And because they have so many skills, Full Stack Marketers typically earn more than a specialist. In this article, we’ll explore some of the qualities that define Full Stack Digital Marketers. Read on to learn about the advantages of being a Full Stack Marketer.
Full-stack marketers don’t have a weak spot
The first thing that makes full-stack marketers so valuable is their versatility. Full-stack digital marketers are adept at almost every aspect of marketing. Although they can perform the roles of other marketing specialists, full-stack marketers are best suited for smaller teams that require flexibility and collaboration. These professionals can perform virtually every task, from writing content to designing ads. Listed below are some of the pros and cons of full-stack marketers.
While full-stack marketers do not have a weak spot, they do have areas that they don’t excel at. One area that they may struggle in is SEO. While SEO is a crucial aspect of marketing, many copywriters don’t have knowledge of SEO and would need to edit their work to add keywords. Consequently, a full-stack marketer with knowledge of SEO would seamlessly incorporate keywords into their work.
They are flexible and adaptable
A full stack digital marketer has many skills. One of the biggest pieces of their job is writing. Content creation and storytelling are essential marketing skills that help you stand out from your competitors. Full stack marketers also know how to make websites responsive and easy to navigate for your users. In addition, they have experience in SEO, PCC, and social media. They have a strong understanding of their specific marketing vertical and can adapt to changing needs with ease.
A full-service agency can help you significantly boost traffic to your website. These full-service agencies offer services such as pay-per-click advertising (PPC) in Google. PPC ads have the same effect as SEO but often yield faster results. Full-service agencies can help you with your keyword list and bid strategy. Depending on your budget and business goals, these types of services can be very effective.
They have 20 sets of skills
A full-stack marketer is a multi-hatted professional with knowledge in various fields. While most marketers only focus on one or two of these disciplines, a full-stack marketer can do a variety of tasks for various clients. As such, full-stack marketers often have 20 or more sets of skills and can divide their time equally among all of them. Listed below are 20 of the most important skills required for a full-stack marketer.
Growth Hacking: Growth hacking is often used for “growth” purposes and aims to achieve maximum growth on a tight budget. Full-stack marketers should have a basic understanding of digital PR. They should know how to reach media contacts, write press releases and reach out to bloggers and journalists. This is because good PR brings in links from authority sources and contributes to SEO. Customer interaction: A full-stack marketer should regularly interact with customers to learn about their needs and to learn what they want.
They earn more than specialists
A Full Stack digital marketer possesses a diverse set of skills. For example, they may be able to develop and implement mobile marketing strategies. These tactics include integrating marketing tools, collecting customer data, and setting up promotional offers. Alternatively, they may be able to engage clients through email marketing, which is an old-fashioned but effective technique. Various organizations send periodic newsletters, auto-responders, and email campaigns to their database of potential clients. Lastly, they might also be familiar with web analytics, which includes traffic analysis and market research.
As a full stack marketer, you should keep learning. Whether it’s reading a new book or listening to a podcast, you should keep learning. In particular, you should be aware of the latest trends in various fields to increase your knowledge and skills. Moreover, you should be familiar with the business practices of the different industries, since this will give you an edge over specialists. While it’s essential to learn about each of these disciplines, it’s not essential to know everything.
0 notes
lakelandseo · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
kjt-lawyers · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
xaydungtruonggia · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
epackingvietnam · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
0 notes
bfxenon · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
nutrifami · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
camerasieunhovn · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
ductrungnguyen87 · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
gamebazu · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
https://ift.tt/3FiO8Cf
0 notes
noithatotoaz · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
thanhtuandoan89 · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
drummcarpentry · 3 years ago
Text
What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
0 notes
arlenenewbrand · 5 years ago
Text
Apple share price drops after announcement
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cameronwjones · 6 years ago
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10 Essential Event Promotion Strategies
Looking for strategies to boost your event promotion efforts? Check out this guide on how to create and implement a killer event promotion strategy in creative ways.
Event promotion can be frustrating if you don’t have a strategy in place ahead of time. With all the different methods and plans out there, it’s hard to know what which one to choose. However, once you understand each key technique, finding an effective and reliable system for increasing event revenue becomes a lot more manageable.
This guide is here to help you learn more about event promotion strategies with lots of specific suggestions for how to tackle it. Knowing how to think about your strategy as a set of grouped tasks will make it not only more manageable but easier to review and assess after the event is over.
What is an Event Promotion Strategy?
You’re probably already familiar with how to promote events, but what about event promotion strategy? It’s basically a marketing plan that can be broken down into the various stages of event promotion, from pre-launch to live. These different strategies, or methods of promotion, include tools you’re already familiar with, like social media, event marketing software, email newsletters, and partner marketing. Any organized system for choosing and implementing specific marketing tactics to increase awareness about your event can be considered an event promotion strategy.
The most difficult part is discovering which promotion strategy is right for your event. Answering this question starts with learning about what options are available to you. This guide will help showcase some actionable event promotion strategies you can actually use to boost your event ROI.
Table of Contents
How a Repeat Business System Can Be Used in Your Event Promotion Strategy
Pre-sale Promotional Strategies You Can Actually Use
Use Online Resources to Amp Up Email Marketing
Driving Passive Sales: Let Social Media Work its Magic
How to be Successful at Video Marketing
Don’t Forget to Optimize Organic Search Results
How to Use Display Ads for Event Promotion
Boost Reach with Effective Partner Promotions
Personalize Your Way to ABM Success
Leverage your Event Technology Stack
1. How a Repeat Business System Can Be Used in Your Event Promotion Strategy
One of the primary concerns event planners have is how will I get people to come to it? Monthly or annual affairs benefit from an already targeted list of prospects from previous attendees but one-time only events don’t have the same benefit. Here’s how a repeat business system can boost ticket sales unique events.
What is a repeat business system?
According to a Harvard Business Review study, increasing customer retention by just 5% can create an average revenue increase of 25% to 95%! Moreover, the cost of acquiring a new customer, an attendee in your case, can be five to 25 times more expensive than retaining a current customer. Even if your event only happens one time you can leverage the power of repeat business in your event marketing. Learning how to harness the components of this system can lead to tremendous engagement.
What Do You Need to Harness the Power of Repeat Business?
Data From Social Media Followers. Does your target audience align with your existing fan base? These followers are all potential candidates for repeat business. They’ve already “bought” into your brand by engaging with you online so inviting them to an event IRL is an easy sell.
Guest Lists from Related Events. These can be from events you’ve planned in the past or ones that your company has hosted. If they had a good time before, they’ll probably enjoy this new event as well!
Web Traffic Analytics. Knowing where your target audience finds you on the web helps you plant strategic ads that will let them know about your upcoming event. Since they already know and like your website, getting their attention in places they’re already hanging out will help you sell more tickets.
There are many tools companies can use to implement the repeat business system, but these are the main contributing options. Whatever tool you use, be sure to be very mindful of why your audience would want to give you more of their time and attention and address those needs in your marketing.
2. Pre-sale Promotional Strategies You Can Actually Use
The three following examples from CoinDesk, Bizible, and Pharma Forum offer some great ideas of promotions you can conduct to propel the success of your event, from early-bird ticket sales to VIP sweepstakes and an event app that delivers networking value to your attendees.
CoinDesk’s Early-bird Promotion 
Source: CoinDesk
CoinDesk actually offered pre-sale tickets to next year’s event a day after they finished their current one! By offering an exclusive discount, they were able to capitalize in the attendees’ very recent memory of their positive experiences to sell more tickets to the next one.
Bizible’s Creative Sweepstakes
   Source: Bizible
Although Bizible was aiming to generate meetings at another event, the same principle can be applied to your event promotion strategy. Whether you choose to collect email, push social shares, or utilize referral links, a creative and enticing sweepstakes offer can get your audience excited to be involved!
Pharma Forum’s Event App
Source: Pharma Forum
Take a page out of Pharma Forum’s book and offer an event app. While they utilized this technology to serve attendees who already purchased their tickets, you can still offer a free event app with features like networking profiles, social media connections, and games with real world prizes to get your audience excited about what’s in store when they decide to join you in-person. An app is also useful for increasing event registrations since users will already be using the technology.
3. Use Online Resources to Amp Up Email Marketing
Event email marketing is a juggling act. With so many moving parts, you might find it difficult to keep up with the increasing demands to stand out in each recipient’s inbox. Luckily there are several tools to help you succeed in building your list and getting the most out of your email marketing efforts.
StreamSend is aimed at helping event organizers with specific features that allow users to upsell, customize opt-in forms, and other tasks that thwart the most common email marketing headaches. Companies can also utilize StreamSend’s built-in database software that can help organize and manage multiple lists at once.
  Source: StreamSend
BombBomb is an email marketing tool that lets you record, send, and track videos within your messages. Videos are a powerful conversion tool but they can often be a bit tricky to plan, film, and share. BombBomb streamlines the whole process so you can get face-to-face with future attendees online. 
Source: BombBomb
ActiveCampaign is another email marketing platform that event organizers can use to promote ticket sales. They offer lots of features to help you figure out what you can improve in all your campaigns! ActiveCampaign even has Split Testing so you can increase engagement by figuring out what your audience responds to the most.
  Source: ActiveCampaign
No matter how you choose to go about marketing your event, make sure you know the best tools and practices for email marketing, especially when it regarding event invitations.
4. Driving Passive Sales: Let Social Media Work its Magic
Did you know you could have attendees do some of the event promoting leg work for you? Creating passive sales on event social media is pretty simple. By building share incentives into your event marketing plan, you can easily crowdsource additional sales. Here are some great ways to get those sales:
Social Sharing Ticket Discounts. Offer retroactive discounts to event attendees who get additional guests to attend your event by sharing a unique link on their social platforms. This provides additional incentive to attendees who’d want a discount on their recent ticket purchase, but moreover is an opportunity for registrants to have an accompanying friend!
Battle of the Hashtag. Turn event hashtags into contests by awarding behind-the-scenes tours or headlining speaker meet-and-greets to those who get the most likes on a post about your event.
Sponsored Prizes. Organize co-marketing giveaways that include donated gifts from sponsors for some extra social media love.
However you choose to promote your event online, crowdsourcing attendees and turning them into passionate advocates is a great way to earn passive sales towards your event.
5. How to be Successful at Video Marketing
Video marketing is a great way to personalize your event invitations, follow ups, and promotions. Forming genuine connections starts with being sincere and there’s no better way to showcase authenticity than with a well executed video.
Did you know that in Vidyard’s 2017 Video in Business Benchmark Report, 90% of viewers claim video promotion was the primary reason they decided to purchase? One way to help get those benefits is by empowering your audience with value-packed content. Make sure your videos are centered on experience and not sales, when done successfully a great video promotion will naturally result in event sales.
Event attendees would appreciate bonus recorded lectures, live Q&As, a series of video-based e-courses, or some other extra that they can access to without having to spend money. If your offer is truly valuable, people will be more inclined to trust your brand and get excited about the wealth of opportunities your in-person event can provide for them.
6. Don’t Forget to Optimize Organic Search Results
Your event website is one of the most important parts of your promotion strategy—it’s where attendees will look at for event information and updates, . When it comes to your SEO strategy, there are some pretty specific event website hacks every planner should know.
Optimize for Voice Search. Offer content with very specific keywords or purposes so your event pages can easily reach the top of voice-search results from smart devices. Remember that the top three spots on Google’s search results get 41.1% of all clicks on that page.
Rank High for Event Specific Keywords. Spend more time targeting long-tail keywords than short ones. Long-tail keywords are more specific, target a niche audience for your event, and tend to be over three words. These will have a much lower search volume and allow your event page to stand out more.
SEO-Centric Event Site. Build your web pages around these keywords by offering content that fills each phrase in a unique and relevant way.
Mobile Responsiveness is Key. While less tickets are bought through mobile devices, many event-goers research events on their phones before completing a purchase. Make sure your website is mobile responsive and not just optimized.
Only use high-quality links. Google and other search engines are able to recognize non-reputable links, relying on these will likely result in site penalization by these search engines. A high-quality link is characterized by being embedded in reputable sources, located near the top of your page, and linked through your targeted keyword for the page.
7. How to Use Display Ads for Event Promotion
Unlike search or text-based ads, display ads are online advertisements that appear on relevant websites and social platforms to target a specific audience. While traditionally display ads have been deemed less effective that its search ads counterparts, the low-cost price tag and visual elements are worth testing as part of your holistic event promotion strategy. Here are some tips.
Hyperfocus your marketing for a smaller audience with a higher ROI. Target URLs your audience visits, apps with content relevant to your keywords, location-specific settings, demographic filters based on your prior research.
Find out what works for your audience. One low stakes investment is static image ads. They’re great for testing different options without too much financial commitment.
Stick to the basics. Focus on the three most common ad sizes found through the Google AdWord’s Display Network. These include the Leaderboard (728x90), Inline Rectangle (300x250), and the Skyscraper (120x600).
Keep things simple by having only one call to action. Viewers should have a good idea of what they’re getting when they click your ad beforehand.
Choose bold images. If your display ad is filled with too many words or dull pictures, your audience might scroll past without taking a second look. Instead, make sure your design elements streamline the visual experience with bold fonts and images that pop.
8. Boost Reach with Effective Partner Promotions
An effective partner marketing event strategy is rooted in a clear understanding of your event goals, extensive preliminary screenings for partners, and strategies for guaranteeing collective buy-in. While most events don’t require too many different partnerships, putting in the effort early on will help make sure your promotional strategy is a success.
Understand need. Why do you need a partner? What can you do with a partner that you cannot do on your own? Before reaching out to potential partners, ask the right questions before getting started to help set and achieve goals.
What value will you be providing your partner? Find out why your partner wants to work with you, what they expect to get out of the promotion, and what they are willing to contribute. Most importantly, make sure you are able to deliver on the aligned goals you come up with, ensuring you foster a long-lasting mutual relationship from the get-go.
Test out potential partners with smaller projects. Was the communication and teamwork effective enough to work together on promoting an entire event?
Start off with a stakeholder meeting. Not only will this be a great opportunity to introduce everyone, you’ll also set the right tone for event and ensure a smoother workflow. Be honest and transparent about your needs — maintaining an “open door” policy for both sides to ensure that all questions can be addressed quickly and easily.
Divide and conquer. List out every task and assign specific members of the team to execute each item. It will be easier to hold everyone accountable and get the job done.
Establish a documented workflow. Don’t let missed emails or mismanaged tasks slip through the cracks, particularly when considering if you will want to continue working with this partner for future events.
Showing interest in partnering means very little if the company you’re interested in working with doesn’t seem to be on the same page or offer the resources to help you and your event succeed. Keep these points in mind to ensure healthy event PR.
9. Personalize Your Way to ABM Success
Account-based event marketing revolves around establishing and targeting a set of ideal attendee accounts for your brand and, more importantly, creating campaigns that are tailored specifically to their needs. The most effective account based marketing strategy for event promotion makes use of a diverse set of principles. Devoting time to understand the individuals who make up your ideal audience helps build long-term relationships while increasing their potential interest in your events. While there are many fundamentals associated with account based marketing, here are a few cornerstones for any event promotion strategy.
Create dynamic offers that are a perfect fit for your target audience. Use analytics to create a social report on your prospects and create tailored campaigns based on this data. Try, for instance, segmenting potential audiences by industry, by job title, or company size.
Fully customize your landing pages. All of your copy, images, offers, and forms should be unique to your targeted viewer. You can even go as far as to include the prospect’s name at the top to really emphasize the extent of personalization you strive for.
Use Google Alerts to gather and act on social intelligence. Set up and study the information to determine what current initiatives and challenges your target audience is engaging with. Knowing what your prospects care about will help make your ABM marketing more specific and timely.
In addition to aligning sales and marketing efforts, these tips will help you achieve the core of truly successful event promotion through ABM. Diligently segmenting and targeting is easier said than done, but this is a great place to start.
10. Leverage your Event Technology Stack
Your event promotion strategies should be facilitated by your event technology stack — the technology that makes your event come to life, from your event software and email marketing tools to your event app. Many of these were mentioned in this list and are tools that become crucial when forming your event promotion strategy, but more importantly in determining the success of your event.
Consider taking an event technology assessment to see how your current tools are helping deliver a successful event—from generating event awareness to engaging your attendees— and where there is room for improvement.
Key Takeaways
As you can tell, there are plenty of ways to enhance your event promotion strategy. To tie it all together, here are some ideas you should remember—regardless of which promotional strategies you end up employing:
You don’t have to start from scratch! There are plenty of amazing tools and resources to aid you in creating the perfect event promotion strategy. Find the one that works best for you by keeping your goals in mind, and understanding how these tools will help you deliver those targets time and time again.
Be as specific as possible in everything you do. Getting to know your audience is the foundation of any successful marketing plan.
Ask for help when needed. There are plenty of people, companies, and teams that are happy to team up and promote your event. Be sure to take advantage of what your network has to offer.
Use these ideas and examples to create an event promotion strategy that propels your event to the next level! With the proper resources and information, your event promotion strategy will become crystal clear and easier to carry out.
from Cameron Jones Updates https://blog.bizzabo.com/essential-event-promotion-strategies
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