Teaching Tuesday: Spy on your Competitors

With content marketing becoming more and more important, knowing what content is performing best not only mitigates time but it allows you to see what your competitors are doing. Without investing time into research around what your competitors are doing, you're potentially going to waste a great deal of money. Today we're going to tell you about a really useful web application that will assist you from a content marketing point of view. Buzzsumo is nothing new to avid marketers, but for those of you who aren't aware of it, you're going to enjoy this. Buzzsumo gives you great insight into what content is working the best. By simply entering in a term (keyword/keyphrase), Buzzsumo will give you a list of articles published on the Internet and alongside an indication as to how many times the article has been shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. You may then filter accordingly and track down the topics that work best. This approach saves countless hours of trying to figure out what people might like and allows you to know what they actually do like! Furthermore, you can find who shared a piece and use that for targeting. A few other features include following authors, receiving alerts when competitor's publish content and advanced result filtering. In the screenshot below you'll see that we performed a search for "digital marketing" and the application returned a number of articles that have been published on the topic within the last month, along with all the share metrics.  I can see that Jacqueline Whitmore was the author of the post and it was published on Entrepreneur.com. I can also see that it received great interest on Facebook so perhaps we could write a similar article on an adjacent topic to gain some traction. The idea here is to not republish or copy the topic, but to write something that has been inspired from the findings. Down the left-hand side of the application you're able to filter by date, language, country and even content types. Being able to filtering is possibly one of the most useful tools that the application offers and should not be ignored. It may take some time to learn how to use the tool to its full potential but once you understand the mechanisms you'll extract incredible value from it and definitely heighten the reach and success of your content marketing.

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