The digital world is more competitive than ever before, with countless companies struggling to find their place online. If today’s experts want to get ahead in the advertising field, then they need to make sure they have the right tools in place to empower staff and understand their audience.

Buzzsumo is a popular monitoring and research tool, intended to help organisations assess the digital landscape, perform competitive analyses, and more. With Buzzsumo, you can find the content that gets shared most on social media channels and use the latest trends to inspire your blog and article topics. You can also set up instant alerts for specific brand names and keywords, so you can track your competitors and stay ahead of the curve.

Analysing your Competitors with Digital Tools

Whether you’re creating content for your own brand, or you’re trying to develop an online presence for a client, you’ll need to keep tabs on your competitors to ensure you’re successful. The only way to make sure that you stand out from the competition in a fast-paced modern world is to make sure that you’re always one step ahead of the other brands in your space. Buzzsumo can help with this, by answering questions like:

• Which content delivers the best results for my competitors?
• Which social media networks do competing brands have the most success on?
• What kind of customers and influencers are sharing competitor content?
• How does my content compare to industry-leading brand content?

Here are just some of the ways that you can analyse competitor content and improve your marketing strategy using Buzzsumo’s competitive intelligence strategy.

1. Find Out Which Content Works Best for your Competitors

Different customers respond well to specific types of content. Unfortunately, it takes a while to figure out which media is going to have the best impact on your consumer. For newer brands, one of the easiest ways to start on the right foot is to check out what their competitors are doing. Since the chances are that you’ll be targeting similar customers, you can find out which types of content perform best for your competitors, then implement similar, but enhanced strategies for your own brand.
All you need to do to find your competitor’s most shared content is add a topic to the “shared content” report. Once you’ve typed in your chosen topic, you can hit search, and you’ll see some of the most shared pieces they’ve produced on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social channels.

2. Carry Out an Influencer Analysis

While you’re finding out which content gets the most shares for your competitors, you’ll be able to look at other aspects of your competitor’s campaigns too. Buzzsumo delivers comprehensive content analysis reports which give you an easy insight into the competitor content earning the most attention in your industry.

You can also check out the influencers and advocates that have been sharing your competitor’s content, which might help to inspire your own campaigns. All you need to do is click on “view sharers” and you can filter influencers according to the number of followers they have, or their level of engagement.

3. Monitor your Competitors in Real-Time

Competitor, brand, and keyword monitoring is nothing new to a seasoned marketer. However, it can be difficult to keep on track of everything when you’re starting to build your brand for the first time. If you want to make sure that your campaigns are having the right impact and giving you an opportunity to get ahead of your competitors, then you’ll need a real-time insight into what’s happening with the other brands in your industry.

Buzzsumo comes with monitoring tools built into their competitor analysis suite. You can create daily alerts or weekly digests, depending on how much information you need straight away. Brands can set up content alerts every time content is published by a competitor. Content alerts can be mailed out instantly, and they’re also available on your dashboard too.

4. Content Performance and Comparison Reports

Finally, if you really want to get to the bottom of your competitor’s performance levels, then Buzzsumo can help with in-depth reports and comparisons. When you sign up and start using the Buzzsumo social tool, you can access detailed reports offering insight into your competitor’s performance levels with different pieces of content. This means that you can see exactly where they’re getting the most success, analyse their average share numbers, and check out other elements too, like the length of their most valuable content.
There’s even the option to issue domain comparison reports to find out whether you’re catching up with the competition or not.