5 Unique Content Strategies To Beat Your Competitors
A solid content strategy can make a huge difference to your business success. However, plenty of marketing gurus gloss over the importance of benchmarking your efforts against your competitors. You are, after all, not immune to market pressures and the influence your competitors can have on your own market share. Furthermore, measuring your content strategy against your competitors can expose a lot of interesting possibilities and opportunities.
This blog is all about unique content strategies that your competitors aren’t using. Why is that important? Well, these are opportunities that you can exploit to reach your audience before others within your sectors do.
Some of these will be more relevant to your situation and some won’t. But at least one of these will work for your business. It’s just about finding the right fit.
Podcasts
If you do any regular commuting or traveling, Podcasts may already be a huge part of your life. If they aren’t already…you may want to get downloading. It makes long trips a lot more exciting (and productive).
But what about actually producing and making podcasts? That’s right. A cheap microphone, some recording software, and a streaming platform is pretty much all you need to get started.
Plus, you can easily upload these on YouTube and reuse the script as a blog. Not to mention all the social posts you can squeeze out of a 15 or 20-minute podcast.
Popular topics include business, entrepreneurship, marketing, learning, investment, and inspirational topics. If your business falls into one of these categories, or you can create an angle that is relevant to your sector, then you really should consider this.
User Generated Content
This is no longer a marketing secret, but businesses still seem reluctant to employ this strategy. User Generated Content mainly works in B2C contexts, especially where the products or services are particularly inspiring or interesting. Fashion, Travel, and Luxury Products are a few key sectors that often employ this tactic. Stories and photos from other clients, after all, do a better job of marketing your business than you could EVER do.
Travel companies, for example, frequently engage with customers and ask them for stories or photos from their experience. The authenticity of this narrative helps to attract other customers and legitimises your offering.
Personal Content
Personal content really helps your business stand out from the crowd. One of the real benefits is that not too many companies out there are doing it. Have a look at your competitors – do they have an About us page? Is it engaging? Do they talk about their personal stories, company ambitions, and do they write inspirational blogs that highlight their company ethos? If not, then this could be a real opportunity.
Watch out though! If you’re in Manufacturing, Construction, the Legal Sector, Accounting or Software, this may alienate some of your audience. Certain sectors value the professional element more than the ‘fun’ element, which is important to remember.
Employee profiles can help with this, but make sure it isn’t overly cliché. For example, if you’re a marketing agency or an accountant, maybe stay clear of the classic ‘coffee addict’ descriptions, as these are becoming a little too omnipresent in a lot of different sectors.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogs are a fantastic way to get quality, sector-specific content that might take you far too much time to research and create. Finding the right influencers and guest bloggers may seem difficult at first, but if you’re in tune with your audience, you should be able to figure out what influences them. More information on this in our Buyer Persona Guide.
Paying for a guest blogging service may seem like the obvious way to get started, but you may actually be able to leverage your own influence in order to set up a mutually beneficial partnership.
Do you have a lot of social media followers? How much monthly traffic does your website get?
These factors may make it lucrative for your guest blogger as well. They provide expertise and a new audience, but so do you. Don’t get caught in the trap of paying for guest blogs if you don’t have to. Setting up successful partnerships that benefit both parties will be much more successful, and usually last longer as well.
Another variation on this would be to interview a guest blogger or influencer.
YouTube Tutorials
Videos are, of course, one of the main ways that businesses engage with audiences. Not only can it help you show off a bit of your business personality, but it operates on a platform that is becoming more and more important to consumers.
Tutorial Videos are especially relevant for tech and software companies, as they often need to provide demos or tutorial videos to help potential customers understand the value of their investment.
However, make sure you are doing tutorial videos right. Mark, who has been doing plenty of Maven Monday videos, explores this a little bit more in the following tutorial:
Chances are that your audience are probably hungry for more videos. In fact, recent research shows that 85% of people said they would like to see more videos from their favourite brands. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of people actually watch videos without sound, making subtitles an absolute must. Check out this blog for the best and easiest ways to add captions to video.
More Information
If you’re looking for a more general idea about how content works within your overall digital marketing strategy, why not download our Essential Guide to Digital Marketing?
