Businesses and Brands have been looking for ways to gain an advantage over each other and this concentration on competition has its advantages and disadvantages.
While having a view of what competitors are doing, it is quite important to focus on the consumers. The act of shifting focus on consumers will open up new opportunities for the business to attract and guide consumers through the actual journey of buying a product or service.
A brand that actually focuses on consumers especially new ones will get to know that many potential customers when searching for what they need online might not search for a specific brand, they might just search for the type of product or service they need in that industry or category.
Many businesses have failed to utilize industry news and contents to their advantage thereby losing out on this avenue to attract new customers. Those who capitalize on the ignorance of their competitors are reaping the gain of using industry content to their advantage.
It has therefore become imperative for smart businesses to start leveraging generic industry news and content to their advantage by positioning themselves as the thought leader in that space by imprinting their brand point of view on industry content and issues as this would boost brand visibility online.
In order to be able to position one’s brand as the thought leader online, there are certain steps to be taken into consideration. The first step is identifying the types of topics that the customers who uses that industry to fulfill their need would seek.
After identifying you can decide to group this topic into themes and see how well you can play with ideas around these topics while considering the search engine optimization.
You can create Google alerts for industry search-related content.
Another step is actually knowing what kind of content that competitors and industry influencers and bloggers push out and how relevant it is to the industry and consumers. This allows you to understand what the audience finds attractive and maybe dislike about your competition and what needs to change in your approach in crafting messages and content.
The third Step is understanding the kind of customers who generally buy from your industry and what kind of content formats that would love to receive industry information and communications.
At the early stage, you can experiment with both long and short-form content to see what people find useful and helpful.
Brands neglecting the use of industry-related content are losing the much-needed advantage to make their brand easy to remember when a customer is in need of a product from that category or industry.
