📷t is important not to get too hung up on what your competitors are doing, it’s all about how you take the insights gathered and implement
them into your own strategy that will be the more critical move going forward. Your competitors might be doing things better than you, but that should just serve as inspiration and incentive to get to where they are, and indeed to surpass them.
And now you have a much clearer view of your target market and your competitors, how does your current digital offering stack up in comparison? What digital assets are you currently utilising, and how well? Which channels are you not using that you could be? Where will your new, converting content be most valuable?
In analysing your own digital assets, it is useful to group them into the Paid, Earned and Owned categories.
📷●● Paid media is when you pay to advertise on a third party channel
📷●● Earned media is when users (not necessarily just your target audience) share your content, spread word-of-mouth and generally discuss your brand, products or services. These mentions are “earned”, either negatively or positively, meaning they are voluntarily given by others
📷●● Owned media is an asset or platform that you own, create and control. Typical owned assets would be your brand website or blog. Social media channels – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – although strictly you do not “own” these platforms and you are subject to any changes as much as the next business, you do control them and don’t have to pay for basic
Section 3 – Where are you now – analyse your digital assets
Today, digital marketing is not a single channel game. The marketing landscape is too vast, and your consumers too dynamic, to consider a single channel or activity.
The most important takeout here is that by applying the Paid, Earned and Owned categories to your marketing activity ensures a well-balanced marketing mix.
Focus on creating a holistic strategy that encompasses all three categories through the creation of useful, engaging, customer-focused content. Host this content on owned channels, promote your best problem-solving solutions through paid media and in the longer term, earn your target audiences trust and loyalty.
This earned media state is the hardest to achieve, as obviously you cannot force users into sharing and commenting on your content.
It takes time, and it takes hard work to really know what makes your customers tick. But the rewards are obvious when your own customers become brand advocates.
We have listed the common assets that would fall under each heading below. How do you fare in comparison to competitors on each channel?
In analysing your own assets, you would first need an indication of what “success” in your industry looks like.
From your own viewpoint, look at your web analytics to see how users consume your owned content – use Google Analytics (or other web analytics platforms) for your website or mobile app, or Facebook Insights for social post performance.
On social media, is your content being shared? Are the competitions? Keep track of your engagement rate, remembering that a large volume of activity doesn’t automatically mean your content is engaging if you have a large number of followers or fans – your follower number should never be a key performance indicator.
Don’t be concerned or disheartened if your assets do not look to be performing at first impressions. This will give you a starting point when looking at creating content and on what channels this content should focus on moving forward.
them into your own strategy that will be the more critical move going forward. Your competitors might be doing things better than you, but that should just serve as inspiration and incentive to get to where they are, and indeed to surpass them.
And now you have a much clearer view of your target market and your competitors, how does your current digital offering stack up in comparison? What digital assets are you currently utilising, and how well? Which channels are you not using that you could be? Where will your new, converting content be most valuable?
In analysing your own digital assets, it is useful to group them into the Paid, Earned and Owned categories.
Section 3 – Where are you now – analyse your digital assets
Today, digital marketing is not a single channel game. The marketing landscape is too vast, and your consumers too dynamic, to consider a single channel or activity.
The most important takeout here is that by applying the Paid, Earned and Owned categories to your marketing activity ensures a well-balanced marketing mix.
Focus on creating a holistic strategy that encompasses all three categories through the creation of useful, engaging, customer-focused content. Host this content on owned channels, promote your best problem-solving solutions through paid media and in the longer term, earn your target audiences trust and loyalty.
This earned media state is the hardest to achieve, as obviously you cannot force users into sharing and commenting on your content.
It takes time, and it takes hard work to really know what makes your customers tick. But the rewards are obvious when your own customers become brand advocates.
We have listed the common assets that would fall under each heading below. How do you fare in comparison to competitors on each channel?
In analysing your own assets, you would first need an indication of what “success” in your industry looks like.
From your own viewpoint, look at your web analytics to see how users consume your owned content – use Google Analytics (or other web analytics platforms) for your website or mobile app, or Facebook Insights for social post performance.
On social media, is your content being shared? Are the competitions? Keep track of your engagement rate, remembering that a large volume of activity doesn’t automatically mean your content is engaging if you have a large number of followers or fans – your follower number should never be a key performance indicator.
Don’t be concerned or disheartened if your assets do not look to be performing at first impressions. This will give you a starting point when looking at creating content and on what channels this content should focus on moving forward.