How to Identify Your Most Engaging Content

How to Identify Your Most Engaging Content (and Stop Wasting Marketing Budget)

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Every piece of content you create takes time and money. Make sure you are investing in the right content by analyzing the most engaging content in your industry so you can optimize your brand’s future content.

To understand what you should invest in, look at your best performing content to identify themes you can use to optimize your content. Then look at your competitor’s content to gain insights that can help improve your content.

What’s driving the most engagement with content by my brand and its competitors?

When planning content you should ask yourself these questions:

  • What topics are driving engagement for me and my competitors?
  • What tactics are driving engagement for me and my competitors?
  • How does my content differ from these brands?
  • Should I consider a different strategy?
  • What should I change to optimize my future content?

In TrackMaven, you can find the answers to these questions by filtering the Content Feed following these steps:

  1. Sort by Impact or Engagement.
  2. Select your time frame.
  3. Select the brands you want to Analyze.
  4. Look through the top performing content, paying special attention to:
    Topics — What is the content taking about?
    Tactics — Are they using questions, Calls-to-action, numbered lists, etc.?
    Visuals — What does the visual capture and how is it published?
    Links — Where is the content linking to?

What’s the best way to analyze the most engaging content?

To keep your observations organized, take out a piece of paper and create four quadrants. In each quadrant, going from left to right, create four sections for topics, tactics, visuals, and links.

Identify engaging content blank quadrant

As you notice themes from each of these categories while examining engaging content by your brand and its competitors, write them down in the appropriate section.

Let’s look at an example using Twitter content in the retail industry. Start off by analyzing this tweet, published by Barneys New York below, taking notes in your worksheet.

Identify engaging content Barneys

Take note of the topics, tactics, visuals, and links.

Here is what we found — did you find these things too?

Identify engaging content quadrant 2

Identify engaging content Barneys 2

Now analyze the rest of the tweets published by Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue, continuing to take notes in your worksheet. Note: All of these tweets appeared in the top 10 tweets in the Content Feed based on Impact, a TrackMaven metric that judges the relative quality of a piece of content.

Identify engaging content Bergdorf

Identify engaging content Nordstrom

Identify engaging content Saks

Here is what your notes may look like in your quadrant:

Identify engaging content quadrant

What are the top themes you noticed in these tweets?

Here is what we found:

  • Bright imagery with rosy pink and black color schemes.
  • Studded details.
  • Designer Valentino featured and sometimes “@” mentioned.
  • Links to designer’s page on the website.
  • Branded hashtags like #BNYHOLIDAY and #SaksStyle.

Now that you have looked at competitors’ content, look at your own content. What would you do differently based on what you saw that worked and didn’t work?

By identifying and optimizing based on the most engaging content by you and your competitors, you can invest in what works and stop wasting time with ineffective content.

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