How to Analyze Your Competitors’ Content Strategy
Everything you need to know to creep like a Content Strategist.
Introducing the Competitive Analysis, your new favorite tool.
A Competitive Analysis is exactly what it sounds like: a process in which you identify top competitors to your brand and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Best implemented during the research or discovery phase of a project, it can give you invaluable insight to help you create better digital products, websites, services, and content.
In this post, I’ll be talking about how to approach a competitive analysis from a content perspective, so that you can create a well-researched content strategy that helps you stand out in a crowded marketplace.
A content-focused competitive analysis is useful if you need to create, plan, or manage content for your business.
First let me say that content refers to more than words, and could take the form of audio, video, or images.
So if you’re planning on creating a digital experience that has any kind of content on it, you’re going to need a content strategy.
Specifically, it helps if you’re working on:
- A website launch or redesign
- Create a digital product
- Launch new services
- Expand content creation efforts
- Plan to create any content at all, really.
Or if you’re just really nosy, love spreadsheets, and have time on your hands. 😉
Who should do them?
Anyone responsible for creating or managing content, or developing a content strategy. Ideally, a content strategist does this work—but not every organization has one.
You can still do a competitive analysis if you’re a copywriter, content manager, content marketer, UX researcher, or even UX/UI designer.
But someone should definitely do it.
How to conduct your competitive analysis like a Content Strategist.
First, let’s talk tools of the trade. I’d like to introduce you to a Content Strategist’s good friend, The Spreadsheet! Cue nerdy applause.
Personally, I like using either Google Sheets for it’s collaborative nature, or Airtable for it’s aesthetic and customizable fields, but you can also use good ol’ Excel. Whatever floats your boat.
In my spreadsheet, I’ve created a column for each evaluator I’ve chosen (which I expand on below), and created individual tabs for:
- Direct Competitors
- Indirect Competitors
And,
- Influencers (People)
- Influencers (Brands)
I consider either people or brands as Influencers who are in different industries, but create digital experiences with features or functionality I’d like to explore. I came across this definition in Jaime Levy’s book on UX Strategy, which I highly recommend. You can include Influencers or leave them out, depending on how much time you have.
Below, I’ll talk about some key evaluators for your content-focused competitive analysis. You may find that you don’t need every category or need additional categories based on your project needs.
That said, here are some great evaluators to start with that I have found to be the helpful in nearly every project.
What to Analyze
Find their UVP: Unique Value Proposition
Each of your competitors should have something that differentiates them from the others, even if it’s a small nuance. You can likely find something that works as their unique value proposition in an About section, or even as a headline or first body section on a homepage. You should be able to either lift or condense this into one sentence.
Let’s take Thrive Global as an example, Arianna Huffington’s latest venture. In the main navigation, there’s a tab labeled “About Thrive,” underneath which you’ll find “Our Mission.”
Bingo. Here we go:
“Thrive Global’s mission is to end the stress and burnout epidemic by offering companies and individuals sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance well-being, performance, and purpose, and create a healthier relationship with technology.” —Thrive Global, Our Mission https://www.thriveglobal.com/about
It’s important to find this type of statement because it typically maps back to your competitor’s core content strategy statement, whether they called it that or not. In our Thrive Global example, it’s easy to connect any of their content pieces back to that one statement.
You basically just reverse-engineered the foundation for all of your competitor’s content. Win.
What content types do they have?
Document every content type the competitor is using. This becomes important later when you’re building your own content strategy and need to choose content types of your own. You might get ideas on what to use or not to use based on opportunities you find in the competitive landscape.
In case you’re wondering, a content type is exactly what it sounds like. Anything that is a repeatable content structure is a content type, and you’ll probably find 5–10 different ones throughout your analysis.
Examples of content types:
- Blog posts
- Press releases
- White papers
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Types of web pages (a product page, for example)
Note their content hub and distribution channels
Consider how they’re distributing content and where it’s housed. Put another way, you want to make a brief note in your spreadsheet about what their content ecosystem is like. It would be going a bit far (and take too long) to actually map each competitors content ecosystem, but do the best you can in a sentence or two.
For most brands, their content hub will likely be a website, and they’ll distribute that content on social media. For other brands, it might not be as clear.
Document their content categories
If we look back to our Thrive Global example, you’ll see clear content categories listed on their homepage, from “Well Being” to “Community.”
If we’re really nosy Content Strategists, we’ll even click into blog posts from each category and notice that some pieces are tagged under more than one of those categories. We’d also note that they’re using an additional tagging system to help make their content more searchable and easier to binge on, which is a nice touch. As you can probably tell, documenting categories can get very detailed if you let it.
How in-depth you go on categories within a competitors content depends on your project (as does everything else). If defining categories is going to be a big part of your work, go for detail. If not, capture the high-level categories and move on.
Describe their tone and voice
The tone and voice of a brand can tell you a lot about their target audience—which might be able to tell you a lot about yours. Consider how their copy feels. Is it light and playful? Technical and straightforward? Complex and full of jargon?
You won’t need to look beyond a homepage to find their voice and tone.
Let’s use a new example and pretend we’re working on a product team launching a budgeting app. If I compare two competitors in the space, youneedabudget.com and personalcapital.com, I would note very different things for tone and voice.
YNAB is casual, conversational and fun. Reading their copy is like you’re chatting with a spunky friend.
Compared to Personal Capital, on the other hand…
Definitely different, huh? Their brand voice is much more informational, straightforward and product focused.
The differences in tone and voice can tell us a lot about their audiences. Even without any information on the two, I’d say YNAB has a millennial audience, while Personal Capital is catering to an older, more affluent group. That’s great insight if I’m creating a competitor product.
(See how important tone and voice are?) 😉
Lastly, your opinion on what they do well and where the gaps are.
If you’re a smart human, you’ll probably have some general observations as you creep through your top competitors. You can just label this as “Notes” or “Observations” in your spreadsheet. These observations are important, even though they’re subjective and might not fit nicely into any other category. Note down anything that stands out to you.
If you want to get fancy, you could also come up with 3–5 evaluators and make notes on each one (taking a heuristic approach). Here’s a bit more info on heuristic evaluation.
That’s it! Go ahead, start creeping your competitors like a pro.
The benefits are endless, and you can impress the pants off of anyone you work with. By doing a content-focused competitive analysis, you can get a clear picture of your competitors’ approaches to content strategy before you create your own. And, it allows you to find gaps and opportunities in the market, get inspired, and ultimately design content your users will love.
A quick note, if you need to present your findings:
Ditch the spreadsheet.
Wait what! We spent all that time on a spreadsheet only to abandon it?
Yes we did, and here’s why.
Think of your spreadsheet as the raw data. It’s going to be your point of reference to access all of the detailed information in an organized way. But when it comes to presenting your findings to clients, stakeholders, or other members of your team… the spreadsheet is not so impressive.
It’s boring.
Instead, try a simple presentation deck with a few good visualizations and lots of bullet points. Present your conclusions instead of the raw data, and do so in a way that is easy to digest and understand. You can always share your spreadsheet in an appendix as a reference point, but you’ll have much better luck getting support when you present your work in a simplified way.
