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In the hyper-competitive world of content marketing, it can be difficult not to compare the content your company produces to the content produced by your competitors. If you’re creating similar types of content, but theirs seems to be making more of a splash than yours, you want to know why, right? A content marketing analysis can give you an idea of how your content stacks up against your competitors’, what they are doing differently from you, and how you can make adjustments to increase your success rate.

What Is Content Marketing Analysis?

A content marketing analysis looks at a variety of metrics to gauge how well your own or a competitor’s content is doing. You can conduct a sweeping content marketing analysis or just look at one or two factors to see what you’re doing versus what another brand is doing.

Analyzing your competitor’s content can feel a bit like you’re snooping, but you’re actually not. Most of the information you’d undercover during an analysis is readily available and isn’t exactly confidential. It’s not like you’re breaking into their offices and swiping their content strategies from their desks.

Plus, you can turn the lens back on you and perform a content marketing analysis on your own brand. It might not be that your competitors are doing something right, but that your company is doing something wrong.

What Qualities Should You Analyze?

The American Marketing Association outlines 17 ways a company can conduct a content marketing analysis. Each way focuses on a specific quality of the content or a content marketing strategy.

A few qualities to pay attention to when analyzing your own or another brand’s content include:

  • How frequently content is published
  • Who’s visiting the site/content
  • How much content the brand has published
  • Whether the content is “quality” or not
  • Where visitors come from
  • What keywords the brand is using
  • Who follows the brand
  • How many people like/share the content
  • What influencers (if any) share or work on the content

When Should You Conduct a Content Marketing Analysis?

It’s worth analyzing your own content marketing or that of a competitor before you begin a new content marketing campaign, or when you’re looking to update your current strategy.

It’s also worth analyzing your competitor’s content if you get word that they’ve launched a new campaign, or if you find out that they are having particularly good success with a campaign. Taking a look behind the curtain at their data can help you see where you can “borrow” from them, or what ideas are worth putting into practice at your brand.

Analyze This: Take a Look at a Popular Brand’s Content

Practice makes perfect, so let’s look at the content marketing created by a relatively large, well-known company. In this case, we look at the blog posts made by J.Crew, the clothing brand.

Hello.Jcrew.com
Publishing frequency:

It’s difficult to gauge how frequently J.Crew posts on their blog, since there’s no tool to measure that, but it looks like they post less than once per week, but multiple times per month.

How much content is on the blog:

A Google search for “site:Hello.jcrew.com” reveals 1,100 results, so there’s about 1,100 pages on the brand’s blog.

Quality of content:

Is the content J.Crew produces useful? You could argue yes. For example, three recent blog posts offer people fashion and clothing care tips. One details how to take care of boots, another is a video showing three ways to tie a scarf, and the third is a video showing how to style one of the brand’s classic shirts.

Who’s visiting:

Yikes! Similarweb reveals that traffic to the blog has dropped by nearly 20 percent from August to September, from 200,000 visits to 160,000. The blog’s bounce rate is nearly 43 percent, and the average visitor spends less than a minute on the blog, visiting an average of 1.62 pages.

Where visitors come from:

Most visitors to hello.jcrew.com come from referrals, mainly from the brand’s main website (Jcrew.com). Less than 8 percent come from social sites, less than 9 percent from search engines, and around 10 percent visit the site directly.

Keywords used:

Hello.Jcrew.com doesn’t include keywords in its tags (viewable on the page’s source by pressing Crtl

[or Command] U).

Followers:

Jcrew.com has 1,694,591 followers on Facebook and 1.8 million followers on Instagram.

Social shares or likes:

Likes on recent Instagram posts range from around 3,000 to more than 15,000. The brand does have social share buttons on its blog posts, but it doesn’t look like many people, if any, share the content.

Influencers:

The brand does work with some influencers (such as this blog post created by street-style star Kyle Edwin Guerre), but it doesn’t seem as though it’s formed many lasting connections with influencers.

Looking at J. Crew, you can easily see where your own brand can do better. You can create a keyword strategy to improve SEO. Or you can focus on improving your social engagement and reach. Or you could consider improving your posting frequency, perhaps by creating a content calendar and sticking to it. You could do any combination of those suggestions.

One thing that is worth emulating is the type of content J.Crew produces. Its blog posts are relevant to the brand. But they also seek to answer questions and solve problems, even if it they aren’t buying J.Crew products.

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