Article #6

How to Create Better Content than your Competitors

There are many things in life that are easier said than done. You have to remember that one of the most powerful marketing concepts you could ever come across is the idea of reverse engineering. It seems like every experienced and effective marketer that I have some across loves saying the phrase " reverse engineering." The problem is, just like the word love, the more people keep repeating it, the less clear it becomes. In fact, it is used so often that most people don't really have a clue of what the speaker is saying. It's as if they're not on the same page.

I understand why this is the case, because a lot of people are very lazy when it comes to contexts. They don't drill down and choose tools that will specify that's why often times people just talk over each other. Make no mistake. If you really want to create better content than your competitors so you can achieve better results, you need to reverse engineer them.

Here is how you do it. First, you look for the themes that are hot. If you noticed that your ten competitors keep talking about the same topic, you know pretty well that somehow, some way the target audience that you were trying to reach out to is interested in those topics. Why? If your competitors don't talk about them, then it means that their market is not interested enough. There's a reason why all your competitors seemed to talk about that same stuff because there's enough built-in demand for it. This is how you build on what they are doing right. In a way, you're making your competitors do your homework by reverse engineering them by simply observing them and paying attention to patterns. By connecting the dots, you are able to build on their strengths while avoiding the weaknesses.

One of the best ways to build on their strengths, of course is to improve on your competitors' content. How do you go about doing this? How do you come up with content that is so compelling that it will draw visitors away from your competitors and shift them to your Instagram page? Well, you can improve content by making it longer. There are tons of short descriptions of photos. Make sure that your photos are up-to-date, this doesn't require much effort. Also, make sure that the landing page content that you feature has multimedia content, for example, when you're drawing traffic from Instagram you're dumping all that traffic to a page, at the very least, include some photos and videos. Make sure as well that your stuff is easy to understand. You have to remember that consumers can be counted on to do nothing if they are a little bit confused. Do not confuse them, avoid that problem. Finally, format your content to be read. You have to feature a very easy to process format, which involves better pictures, fonts and better spacing. Lastly, learn to share this new and improved version of this content on the same network on Instagram.

You would notice that your competitors used the same circle of influencers, start there. You should also pay attention to the hashtag reverse engineer, start with those. When I say start, I mean do not end with them. Use them as starting points. You will quickly realize that some similar hashtags end up producing more traffic. Increase your visibility by branching out from the initial pool of hangtags that you reverse engineered from your biggest competitors on Instagram.
