What Does Content Marketing Success Look Like?
If you’re like most marketers, you report on the successes (or failures) of your marketing content based on first-party data alone. But without competitive benchmarks, how do you know what success looks like in your industry?
The short answer is: you don’t. Take this example from the TrackMaven platform comparing retailers Nordstrom and Target on Twitter:
Target has a drastically larger Twitter following compared to that of Nordstrom, and both brands are tweeting four times per day on average. But despite its much smaller Twitter audience, Nordstrom is driving nearly twice as many retweets.
Target’s Twitter performance looks even more dismal compared to its core department store competitors. Again, Target has a much larger following compared to its competitors (1.2 Million followers versus 296,408 followers on average). But while Target averages only 27.11 retweets per Tweet, its competing department stores average 95.35 retweets.
Imagine if you were Target in this situation. If you were only looking at your own data, how would you know that you’re losing the engagement battle? You might (falsely) think you’re beating Nordstrom and key department store competitors based on your big follower count alone.
But when compared to the competition, Target is falling far short. Its large social following is going to waste, leaving an opportunity for competitors with smaller, but more engaged audiences to dominate on Twitter.
Take a look at another example from B2B cloud computing company NetApp. In the graph from the TrackMaven platform below, we can analyze NetApp’s performance on LinkedIn.
At first glance, things look positive: NetApp has grown their number of LinkedIn followers (purple), and drove their average interactions per LinkedIn post to higher peaks across the past 90 days.
But when we compare NetApp’s LinkedIn performance to the rest of the cloud computing industry, we see a very different picture. In the share of interaction graph below, we can see that NetApp (orange) is actually getting drowned out by competitors on LinkedIn. In fact, IBM (green) consistently dominates half of the total interactions on LinkedIn.
While NetApp’s LinkedIn performance looked successful on its own, its results pale in comparison to the massive engagement being reaped by competitors. When we zoom out and look at LinkedIn content within the cloud computing industry as a whole, it becomes clear that IBM is significantly outperforming the rest of the competition on this key B2B marketing channel.
Competitive benchmarks put your content marketing in context. If you’re trying to stay a step ahead of competitors, the time spent creating and distributing content on each channel becomes all the more valuable. Competitive benchmarks let you spot areas for improvement, learn what is actually working on each channel, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
For more on how to structure and analyze your competitors’ content, check out A Guide To Understanding Your Competitive Landscape .
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
