How to Monitor Your Content Marketing Efforts

Can I tell you a secret? About a quarter of my content marketing strategy is directly informed about what my competitors are doing. It is extremely helpful to look at their tactics and see how they work in real time or in historical context. All the information I need is at my fingertips and I didn't have to put it together, organize it or analyze it myself.

Using competitive marketing surveillance is the perfect way to help you see what your audience (many of whom overlap with these competitors, big or small) is reacting to. This then gives an overview of their needs.

Create your competitive analysis summary

What are your customers looking for now? Do they have questions they are eager to answer? Maybe you have some information that gives a different perspective on an element of the industry than ils had not considered.

Here are some ways you can define your content marketing strategy, some of which will come from your research and work. The rest will be easily accessible by monitoring your competition and the people they manage to target.

It is also possible to do your own monitoring through a manual data retention process.

First, you'll need to organize data about your competitor's content by checking all of their content , from blogs and podcasts, videos and social media. Also, be sure to look for content forms such as webinars, white papers, eBooks, and case studies.

Once you have a good selection of c ontent competitors, sort it by Competitor and indicate the type of talenu they create, how often they publish it, how much is currently available, and the quality. Be sure to note the finer details, such as the length of the most popular posts and the density of keywords .

I have adapted one of the SmartSheet models for this purpose:

[ Actions : Upload your template here . Then adapt the first column depending on what you are going to analyze and monitor. If you plan to collaborate with your team, upload it to Google Docs, then use the plugins to add it to your WordPress dashboard.]

From there, start looking at individual parts and finding models. What are they doing in their most popular pieces? What questions do they answer? What keywords are they targeting in this work?

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I will usually create a spreadsheet with this information and update it every few months. It's good to go back and get a full picture of their strategy.

Hunting automation with competitor tracking tools

Mention and Editor Tracking Tools: Buzzsumo, Google Alerts and Cyfe

Buzzsumo (+ Buzzsumo Alerts)

Buzzsumo is one of my favorites personal. It gives you a lot of information, from web statistics to SEO and social media. Using the pro version can be a bit expensive, but it's worth it for most people who want a detailed look at what's going on with other brands or theirs. To try them out, you can go to their home page and search.

They have all kinds of awesome filters and search operators that make it easy for you to drill down into your tors' content tactics. Author search allows you to search for the content of a certain author (for example, your competitor's main blogger) to find all articles and the files they place outside from their own blog ina certain amount of time:

In Buzzsumo Alerts, I manage all the monitoring of my competitors. This works well because their search engine is focused on content , so I get alerts about the mentions that really matter (i.e. those from blogs and high traffic media. ).

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simpler tool that can be used in conjunction with others, and is a simple way to set alerts for n 'any subject or brand. Create various alerts for different topics, some brand related and some industry specific. You can ask him to tell you once a week, a day or with each mention.

Unfortunately, this will give you a fair amount of unrelated content, so if you find that you are getting too many unnecessary alerts, try specifying your keywords a bit more directly.

There are other toolsmonitoring which you can find here and other marketing tools listed here .

Cyfe

Cyfe (Disclaimer: This is my personal content client) is an affordable business dashboard that can be used to monitor almost anything you can think of, including your competition and their content marketing tactics.

You can create your own custom widgets to form your dashboard and use predefined widgets which include:

• Google Alerts (you can view and archive alerts using widget)
• Twitter search (you can monitor and archive your competitors' Tweets - Tweets mentioning them along with their branded hashtags)
• Google Trends to detect peaks of interest in one of your competitors
• RSS feeds (to easily combine RSS feeds from your competitorsin one).

Tools to monitor tactics on the page: SE Ranking

SE Ranking is the multi-feature SEO platform that can be used for many purposes including competitive analysis. One of my favorite features is the page change monitoring , which sends email alerts whenever a page is changed.

Add the most important pages of your competitors. These can be:

• Commodity pages
• Ranked pages for big and expensive search queries
• Pages that attract the most backs .

Whenever your competitor is there to optimize or re-optimize one or more of their key landing pages , you will receive an email alert and will be able to guess what is going on:

• Have they discovered better keywords (i.e. those that are more easilywhich islands to classify, which convert better, etc.) to target?
• Did they find a better way to get their pages featured in search?
• Are they expanding / narrowing their product offering?

It is also a good idea to monitor your competitors' channel:

• Home page
• YouTube (to be alerted when adding new videos)
• Directory pages and local categories (to find other added competitors).

Tools to monitor email marketing tactics: Competitors and Owletter

Competitor.email

I haven't personally used Competitor , but I've heard great things from a number of people who have. Track and analyze competitor's email marketing campaigns in a convenient dashboard. Presentation of incredible insights and reports willient to be undoubtedly invaluable.

They have a white paper available which explains in more detail their tool and how you can use it apply to your own monitoring and marketing campaign. You can also try a demo version to get a feel for how it works.

Owletter

I have long subscribed to newsletters from competitors. This is an easy way to see how they are handling their email marketing campaigns, but it can get a bit full in my inbox. Owletter fixes the problem by creating a dashboard with competitor emails, storing, analyzing and reporting them in one place.

Do you have a the tool that you think deserves to 'Be on the list? Know a trick for monitoring competitor content? Let us know in the comments.

Find out more pread:

• Content Marketing
• SEM