Finding your competition online and monitoring their activities

The first step to researching your competitors is finding them across social media. However, you need to analyze more than your competitors’ websites. Fortunately, a variety of tools are available to help you find your competition online. When you find your competitors, you need to analyze what they’re doing on their branded online destinations as well as on sites they don’t own but simply maintain a presence.

Following are a number of methods and tools you can use to conduct your competitive online research:

• Google Advanced Search: Conduct a daily or weekly search on your competitors’ names using the Google Advanced Search tool (www.google.com/advanced_search) to find content or conversations recently published about them.
• Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) to send you alerts for your competitors’ names.
• Twitter: Follow your competitors on Twitter (www.twitter.com) and read their tweets. Use the Twitter profile search tool to find accounts (https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter). Note that you have to be logged into your Twitter account to use the Twitter profile search tool.
• Facebook: Follow your competitors’ profiles and business pages on Facebook and read their updates. You can use the Facebook People Search tool (www.facebook.com/search.php?type=users) to find profiles on Facebook, but if a profile is set to private, you can’t view it unless you’re “friends” with that profile owner. You can search for pages from the Facebook Page Directory search (www.facebook.com/directory/pages).
• LinkedIn: Follow your competitors’ profiles on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) and read their updates. If you know the names of your competitors’ executives or employees, you can search for them on LinkedIn using the search tool found at the bottom of the LinkedIn home page or at the top of any page in your LinkedIn account. You can’t view a private profile unless you're connected with that person. Note: Premium LinkedIn accounts allow users to see who is viewing them, so be aware if you don’t want your competitors to know that you’re checking them out.
• On-site searches: Visit your competitors’ websites and blogs and look for links to other online profiles or branded destinations such as YouTube channels, Flickr profiles, and so on. Companies that are implementing a social media marketing or content marketing plan should have links to their various branded online destinations prominently displayed on their websites and blogs. A good example is shown in Figure 2-1.

As you find your competitors’ online destinations and conversations, analyze them to discover what kind of content they’re publishing. Can you find any gaps or any opportunities to “borrow” a share of voice or to offer content that your target audience isn’t already getting from your competitors? Is there a way to repackage the type of information they’re publishing to make it more useful and interesting to consumers? What content are your competitors publishing that sparks conversations or sharing? Your findings can help you determine what kind of content to create and where to publish it.

Eavesdropping on your competitors’ online conversations

Thanks to social media, you can read the conversations your competitors have with their customers and the online audience at large. Don’t pass up this opportunity! Ten or twenty years ago, business owners would have done anything to be a fly on the wall and listen to their competitors’ conversations, but there was really no way to do it legally. Many of those conversations are right at your fingertips now with social media. Look for them and listen to them! You can glean some important lessons that can have a significant impact on your marketing strategy.

You can start listening to your competitors’ online conversations by analyzing their various online profiles and branded destinations as described in the previous section. However, other ways of listening in on your competitors’ conversations can give you even more insight. Following are several tricks you can try to get the inside scoop on your competitors’ messages and relationships with consumers:

• Friends and connections: Review your competitors’ profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites and find out who is connected to them as well as whom they’re following. Follow those people, too, and keep track of the related conversations and sharing.
• Groups: Review your competitors’ profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups, and other social sites and find the groups in which they belong to and participate. Join those groups and monitor your competitors’ conversations within those groups.
• Followers: Review your competitors’ profiles on Twitter and see both whom they’re following and who is following them. Follow those people, too, and find out what content is being discussed and shared.

• Blog comments: Read your competitors’ blogs and pay close attention to the comments section on each blog post. Follow links within profiles, particularly the links that lead you to the site of the person who published a comment. Discover more about the people participating in these conversations and reach out to them. If your competitors accept and publish trackback links on their blog posts, follow those links to discover who else is writing about the content published on your competitors’ blogs. If they’re linking to your competitors’ content, you need to connect with them so they’ll link to your amazing content in the future. You can see an example of a trackback link published on a blog post in Figure 2-2.

  Trackback links are published within the comments section on some blogs providing an easy way for bloggers to see what other sites and blogs are linking to their content and potentially driving additional traffic to those sites and blogs from interested readers.

• Incoming links: Use a link checker tool like Google’s to find out what sites and pages are linking to your competitors’ websites and blogs. The owners of those sites and pages are actively discussing your competitors and sharing their content. You need to get a piece of that action, too, so reach out to those site owners and start building a relationship with them. To find incoming links to your website or blog, you can conduct a link search through Google by typing “link:yourURL” into the search box at www.google.com (where yourURL is the URL for your site, such as link: www.keysplashcreative.com). Google Webmaster tools also offer more comprehensive link research results (www.google.com/webmasters/).

Finding gaps and opportunities

As you monitor ongoing conversations and your competitors’ involvement in those conversations and related content, look for opportunities to fill gaps and offer something different or provide similar information in a better way. In other words, don’t market scared. Just because your competitors are publishing a specific type of content in a specific way doesn’t mean those strategies or tactics are right for you and your audience. However, knowing what those strategies and tactics are can help you differentiate your business or better position your brand as the brand of choice.

Just as each piece of content that you publish becomes part of the larger compounding effect that can deliver long-term sustainable growth to your business, so do your research and analysis efforts. All together, your activities will enable you to drive organic buzz about your business that can be far more powerful than a simple banner ad.

Think outside the box and come up with new ways to offer content that your audience wants and needs. For example, if you sell customized gift baskets online, allow consumers to view those baskets through an online video so that they can see exactly what their money will buy and make changes on demand. This visual approach provides a creative way to add a tangible element to an online buying process. A business that once could thrive only offline can now thrive online, thanks to creative content marketing and communications via the user-generated content of social media.

If you own a business that can help customers by offering step-by-step tutorials, don’t just provide in-person training classes or instruction manuals. Instead, add a content marketing aspect by offering webinars or screencast tutorials. You can even turn tutorials into videos that can be shared across social media to broaden the reach of your content and indirectly market your business. By offering useful information to consumers, you build a relationship with them based on appreciation and trust. In this way, you can deliver positive word-of-mouth marketing as well as tangible results to your business for years to come.

Determining your target audience and segments

The best content marketing strategy is to find your audience and publish the right kind of content to interest these people and add value to their lives. A combination of demographic and behavioral targeting is essential to creating a solid content marketing strategy.

Part of leveraging social media to market a brand or product involves changing your marketing strategy in terms of segmenting your customer base. Finding your best customers is a fundamental step in building a business. When you determine the customers you want to target, you need to define ways to find more people like your best customers in order to target that market with meaningful advertising, promotions, and so on — or in the case of content marketing, more useful and shareworthy content. The traditional way of taking this step is to segment your customers by focusing on similar demographic characteristics, such as age, income level, gender, and so on, and then to find similar people based on those demographics.

However, this approach is not necessarily the most effective way to segment and target your audience on the Internet. It’s true that you need to know the primary demographic profiles of your best customer audiences and whether those profiles match sites where your audience may spend time; however, those factors aren’t the only ones that matter — because the social media can be analyzed using behaviors in addition to demographics. In fact, behavioral targeting is often more powerful than demographic targeting because, while using the Internet for researching, communicating, shopping, building relationships, and more, people don’t necessarily reveal personal demographic information. Furthermore, social media is filled with people who participate in conversations and publish content anonymously or by using pseudonyms, so actually compiling demographic information about these people can be very difficult.

Clearly, relying on demographic segmentation when building a content marketing strategy may lead your business down a path to failure. Instead, Internet users need to be segmented and targeted based on their online behaviors. What sites do they visit? What conversations do they join, and what do they say in those conversations? What content do they share with their own audiences? Those are just a few of the relevant questions marketers need to ask to understand their current and potential online audiences.

By continually evaluating online customer behaviors and adjusting the marketing strategy to address those behaviors, you can find similar people and introduce the best content, in the best places, and at the best time.

Finding your audience’s hangouts

One of the most important steps you need to take before you launch your content marketing plan is to find where your target audience already spends time interacting and sharing online. You can use some of the tricks suggested earlier in this chapter by researching your competitors’ followers and connections across social media. Chances are many of those people will be part of your target audience, too.

However, the first step is to use keywords to conduct Google searches (because that’s the tool most people use to search for information online). In other words, pretend you’re a potential customer looking for the type of business, products, or services you offer. Follow the links delivered in the search results just as a consumer would. As you follow the paths provided, you can follow your target audience. Inevitably, you’ll find blogs, websites, forums, groups, and so on that your target audience is reading, participating in, and sharing with their own audiences. You need to get involved on those sites, too.

Begin by joining the conversations happening on those sites and offering useful information that adds value to the existing dialogue. Don’t self-promote yet. Beginning to develop relationships with your target audience on the destinations where they already spend time is critical, and you can’t do that if you’re trying to sell. If you want to be a welcomed member to the party, you have to bring something to the table that is meaningful, or no one will want to hang out with you.

When you become a recognized part of the community on a specific destination where your target audience spends time, you can begin bringing those people back to your own branded online destinations, as discussed later in this chapter, where you can offer even more information through your amazing, shareworthy content and deepen your relationships with them. That’s how you build lasting relationships that lead to brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and long-term sustainable growth.

Discovering what your audience wants and needs

If you’re not delivering the type of content your target audience wants and needs, they won’t read or view your content nor will they share it. In fact, they may even ignore you or publish negative responses to your content, which you don’t want to happen.

Just as you need to determine what your audience wants and needs from your products and services to develop effective advertising, you need to determine what your audience wants and needs from content. Trying to think of new and amazing content to publish consistently and persistently can be intimidating. Don’t worry. Every piece of content you publish doesn’t have to be amazing. However, you don’t want to dilute your value by publishing too much content that isn’t discussion-worthy or shareworthy. The majority of your content should be meaningful, but everyone has days when they’re simply not up to their full potential. It’s acceptable to have off days when it comes to content marketing, and particularly if you don’t have a large staff to cover for you. Just don’t let it become a habit, or all of your hard work will have been for naught.

To find out what your audience wants and needs from your content, you can start by listening. In fact, listening is one of the most important parts of any successful content marketing strategy. You need to constantly be listening to the online conversation so that you can modify your content marketing strategy as necessary. Consumers move quickly and change their minds even more quickly. If they find your content to be stale or outdated, they’ll move on in search of another business or destination that offers the type of value-added information they want and need.

Use the tools suggested in the previous section to find your audience and listen to their conversations, just as you did to find and listen to your competitors. Furthermore, ask your customers both in person and online what kind of information they want and need. Publish a poll on your blog using a tool like Polldaddy (www.polldaddy.com) or SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com), or pose the question on a forum or group you belong to where your target audience spends time. Additionally, pay attention to your own website and blog analytics to see what content is driving a lot of traffic, comments, and incoming links.

Your focus should be on long-term growth and trends. A few audience members will always be louder than others, and certain pieces of content may attract a lot of attention. It’s up to you to pick out fluctuations that spell opportunities and anomalies that won’t drive business in the long run. Pursue the opportunities aggressively, and put the anomalous traffic spikes on the backburner.

Finding and connecting with influencers

While you’re researching your competitors and finding your target audience, you should also be looking for the online influencers, the people or companies who can help you drive more traffic and conversations around your content. For example, if you own a dating service company, you need to search for the top dating and relationship experts on Twitter and Facebook or the top dating bloggers. These people already have audiences that will be good matches for a dating service business, and if they’re very popular, they probably have relationships with many of those audience members and have influence over them.

A number of search tools can help you find influencers across social media. Several options to get you started are listed here:

• Twitter apps: Use Twitter apps such as WeFollow (www.wefollow.com) or Twellow (www.twellow.com) to find people by keyword or interest on Twitter. For example, as shown in Figure 2-3, a search using the tag organicfood on WeFollow delivered 88 results that a business selling organic foods would be wise to research. Look for people with a lot of followers and a lot of retweets and @replies to show they’re truly engaged with their audiences.
• Blog searches: Conduct a search for blogs by keyword by searching online for your topic and adding the search term blog or search a site like IceRocket (www.icerocket.com). Look for blogs that are updated frequently with quality content and have high subscriber numbers (if they’re published on the site), Alexa rankings (www.alexa.com), and Compete rankings (www.compete.com). Though these ranking tools aren’t 100 percent accurate, they can give you an idea of a blog’s reach and influence.
• Video searches: Many online influencers publish video content. You can conduct video searches on a number of Web sites, including the largest online video site, YouTube (www.youtube.com), or Google (http://video.google.com). Look for video publishers whose videos get a lot of views and comments and whose profiles link to their blogs and other branded online destinations so that you can get a better idea of their positions and influence in the online space.
• Groups: You can search for groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google (http://groups.google.com/). Not only will your target audience participate in relevant groups, but group leaders also could be highly influential voices online. Look for groups with a lot of active members in order to find the best groups to target.

When you find online influencers who seem to have an engaged audience of people who match your target audience profile, work to get on those influencers’ radar screens. Follow them on Twitter and retweet their content or send them @replies. Friend them on Facebook, like their Facebook page if they have one, and converse with them. Read their blogs and publish comments. However, don’t self-promote immediately. Instead, work to demonstrate your knowledge and ability to add value to the online influencers’ conversations through social media marketing efforts before you share your own content with them.

An aggressive approach of self-promotion is unlikely to keep you in the good graces of online influencers. Instead, build a relationship first, and then when the time comes when you want to ask an online influencer to help you spread the word about your content or business through a tweet, guest blog post, or other tactic, that online influencer is more likely to be willing to help you.

Where: Location! Location! Location!

You can use many tools to establish your core branded online destination. A blog is the best choice, because it gives you the most flexibility in terms of the type of content you can publish in one place. Blogs are also very search-engine friendly and are very powerful in terms of the compounding effect of blogging and building your online presence.

But what if blogging isn’t right for you? What if the idea of writing even a single paragraph blog post sounds like a monumental effort? That’s okay. Choose another tool that you do enjoy and make that your core branded online destination. Some of the most popular core branded destinations other than blogs are Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, YouTube channels, or Twitter profiles. You can make any social site your core branded destination, because the value comes from the content you publish there, not the name of the tool.

You can read the story of Naked Pizza told in Book 3, Chapter 1. It’s the perfect example of a brick-and-mortar retailer that successfully uses Twitter as its core branded online destination. The most important thing that you need to do is to ensure that your core branded destination offers the most information to enable you to connect with and build relationships with your target audience. If Naked Pizza can achieve that in 140-character tweets, so can you.

Designing your central hub

If your core branded destination is the central hub for all your content marketing efforts to which all roads lead, then you need to make sure that central hub accurately reflects your brand image and promise. It needs to meet consumers’ expectations for your brand both in content and visual appeal.

For example, a technical company positioning itself as expert in website development should have a core branded destination that looks great, loads quickly, and is designed with intuitive navigation with all the bells and whistles people expect from a top website development provider. If that company’s core branded destination looks like an out-of-the-box, standard site that anyone could create with little technical knowledge, consumers will be confused and search for another site and company that meets their expectations.

Therefore, take time to make sure your core branded destination looks great, works well, and accurately reflects your brand. If you invest money in your content marketing strategy, then the design of your core branded destination should be at the top of your priority list when it comes to setting your budget.

Fortunately, you can find designers who can help you create branded blogs, Twitter backgrounds, Facebook pages, and more. Following are several sources to help you find affordable design help:

• Twitter backgrounds: You can get custom Twitter background design help from many freelance designers.
• Freelance blog designers: You can search for freelance blog designers on Google or check the footer in blogs you like to see if a link to the designer is provided. Alternatively, you can publish a design request opportunity on Craigslist (www.craigslist.org) or a freelancer website such as Freelancer.com (www.freelancer.com), Elance (www.elance.com), or iFreelance.com (www.ifreelance.com). Some of these sites require that you pay a fee to publish a listing, so be sure to read all of the site requirements.

Blog design doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars. Thanks to the many premium themes available for the most popular business blogging application, WordPress, you can purchase a premium theme and hire a designer to help you tweak it to match your brand and needs for anywhere from a few hundred dollars and up, depending on the extent of your customization requests and the designer you choose. To find out more about blog design and themes, check out Blogging All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Susan Gunelius (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Adding value and making it easy to buy

Of course, your core branded destination should offer a wealth of content that adds value to your target audience’s everyday lives so that they talk about it, share it, and come back for more. But there is more to creating your core branded online destination than publishing amazing content on a site that’s well designed. You also need to make sure it’s extremely easy for your audience to buy from you or perform the action you want them to do when they visit your site, such as submit an inquiry form.

No matter how important it is to publish amazing content and indirectly market your business through your content, you’re still running a business, and you need to make money. Although you don’t want to be overly aggressive through your content in promoting your business (review the 80-20 rule described in Book 3, Chapter 1), you do want to make sure that visitors can easily make a purchase or perform your desired action when they come to your core branded destination. You don’t want to make them feel like they’re being pushed to buy something, but you do want to make sure the option is always available and easy to do.

Therefore, make sure links to your online catalog or inquiry form (or other page or action you want visitors to follow) are prominently displayed on every page of your core branded destination. Don’t interrupt the audience’s experience as they read your content and engage with you. For example, a pop-up window that appears when visitors navigate around your site is a surefire way to annoy them. Instead, provide links for convenience in your blog’s sidebar or core branded destination profile, so they’re easily accessible but not overbearing and interruptive.