How To Spy On Your Competitors
By: Sid Khaitan
Tags: Messaging, Content, Marketing, Content Strategy, Brand Strategy

How To Spy On Your Competitors

Photo by Lianhao Qu on Unsplash

Audits are like poems and spy movies. They either inspire or tire.

I’ve seen it both ways — excruciatingly mind-numbing presentations that put dents in the bottom line and induce naps. Or dynamic dialogues that spur positive change and results. What’s the difference between good and bad?

A good competitive analysis aligns to objectives, uncovers white space opportunities, and illuminates a roadmap for action. Here’s how you can leverage an audit to optimize your startup, personal brand, or client.

Find the sweet spot between goals and unmet needs.

Content is no longer king. Context is.

Defining the desired outcomes of an audit is a great place to start. Seems intuitive, but I can’t tell you how many times this gets forgotten. Being explicit about the benefits for each party involved and avoiding jargon trims the fat and paves the way to insight.

Content strategy definition created by the author.

“Elevate brand awareness” is not good enough. Why do you want to build awareness? What will that allow the business and its customers to accomplish? Are we looking to improve recognition and recall, or do we just want more eyeballs on our logo? How do we want to be remembered?

The SMART framework works well here. Often used for personal goal-setting, it also serves as a litmus test for organizations. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific. Another method involves tracing everything back to the company’s mission statement.

Next week, I’m joining a startup called Chili Piper as a Senior Product Marketing Manager. So I decided to use them as a sample case.

Normally I’d get a chance to review past documents, interview leaders, and dive into revenue goals along with current marketing metrics. For this exercise, I’ve drafted a few goals without all the context:

Gain an understanding of the competitive landscape to onboard quickly as a new employee and be able to contribute to product launches Find out what competitors are doing well and search for areas of improvement from a tactical standpoint Uncover customer needs that are not being met by competitors to develop a cohesive messaging strategy and ideate on future product features

As you can see, these are customized and grounded in reality. The goals are written to acknowledge any gaps and set the stage for what people are about to see.

Do the homework and prioritize competitors.

Pro tip: you don’t have time to boil the ocean.

Unless you’re planning to write a 100-page dissertation about your competitors, there’s no need to find every competitive alternative on the face of the Earth. Your customer likely hasn’t gone that deep, and you don’t need to focus on every little detail.

A bird’s eye view will suffice.

Whether it’s a client project or my own research, I ask everyone involved to prioritize 4–5 key direct competitors. This helps focus the work and create an apples-to-apples comparison. You can always go back and add more, or even revisit specific tactics or best practices from indirect players in the space.

“If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer… you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.” — Elon Musk

Once you have your competitors in hand, you can plot them on a perceptual map. This involves coming up with a few axes and sticking each of the brands on a 2-by-2. But if you nerd out over quantitative analysis, check out this link for a deeper dive on how to use survey data to ground this view in reality.

Sample perceptual map inspired by Dr. Iqbal Zafar at DePaul University

If we were brand managers for Snapchat, the map could help us realize how to differentiate ourselves from the other brands. Or understand what market gaps exist when it comes to customer preference.

This brings us to the next point.

Develop evaluation criteria and dish out scores.

Some pundits will tell you to ignore the competitors and focus on customers.

The problem is, customers might be focused on the competitors. At the very least, they’re focused on the category.

Customers have expectations for how their problems should be solved. If you’re not able to meet those standards, then you either have to define a new category or start price wars to the bottom.

Sample quantitative comparison by author.

Although the comparison above is ultimately subjective, it factors in a mix of quantitative and qualitative signals to determine who’s doing what well. It also paints a clearer picture of where we can improve.

After reviewing some of the areas where the competition stands out, I’ve developed a few recommendations for how we can win.

Instead of saying we did the work, this shows you we did the work.

Instead of pretty-looking graphs, this tells you what to do next.

Search for gaps and opportunities in messaging.

Make your content pack a punch.

How? By answering the questions your current and future customers have across their buying journey.

A topic coverage analysis can reveal how competitors are addressing unmet needs and help discover new opportunities for messaging.

Sample topic coverage analysis created by the author.

This one is tough. We’ve set up the problem, described our products, highlights customers and partners, offered previews and free trials, and even recorded case studies and workflows. But the target audience may still be wondering when they should buy.

Is it after they’ve reached a level of sophistication with their marketing? When are they ready for this new, shiny SaaS product that makes their lives easier? Is it too early? Is it too late?

By crafting a story around the product and putting customers at the heart of it, we can help them understand when to engage and purchase our solutions.

“Imagine your customer is a hitchhiker. You pull over to give him a ride, and the one burning question on his mind is simply Where are you going? But as he approaches, you roll down the window and start talking about your mission statement, or how your grandfather built this car with his bare hands, or how your road-trip playlist is all 1980s alternative. This person doesn’t care.” ― Donald Miller

Competitive audits are one piece of the puzzle.

It’s about combining different lenses to paint a better picture.

Audits diagnose what competitors are doing well, but they should always be conducted in the context of brand goals, user needs, and context.

You can’t go wrong if you: