How can you differentiate your content plan from competitors?

When analyzing your competitors' content, it's important to take your own position into account. Do they have an army of writers, while you're lucky to have half a dozen on a good day? Is their SEO profile way ahead of yours? If you're smaller, you won't be able to put out as much content nearly as often, meaning you have to be a lot more tactical with what you *do* choose to put out. Find gaps your competitors haven't noticed yet, or keywords that might have a bit less traffic but lower difficulty overall. If you're punching above your weight, you need to fight with your weaknesses in mind.

When choosing content formats and channels, it's important to find the intersection between what your team is good at and what your audience values. If you have a team member who likes to shoot short films as a side-hustle, then you might have an advantage in video marketing, but it's no use if your audience skews older—and thinks "YouTube" is something you pick up at the hardware store. Experimentation is your friend here. Find out what your team is good at, keep an eye on performance metrics (and not just traffic, conversions count too) and use these findings to guide what you do next.

Experimentation is absolutely essential when you're looking to grow, but you have to do it right. The worst thing you can do is put a bunch of time into a project that gets abandoned right after it's launched and doesn't even teach you a thing or two. Treat every experiment like you're back in high school physics. Take time to develop your hypothesis, establish the parameters of your experiment, clearly define success and failure, and make sure you learn a thing or two from it. And don't be afraid of failure. A properly executed but failed experiment is a lot more valuable than a rushed, moderately-successful one.

Your content needs to be unique to your brand. Don't just sound like your industry counterparts, stand out from the crowd. Zhuzh your content up through the art of storytelling. This makes it interesting for your audience to read. A unique voice coupled with a great story differentiates you from the rest. Finally, think differently. How will your content truly stand out if it looks the same as every other content from your competitors? Look at what they are doing and dare to be different from them.