Hello! How ya doing?
After our deep dive into the best product marketing tools in the market, let’s get back to working on our product marketing strategies.
Competitor analysis is one of the most important parts of a product marketer’s job but, if you’re building out this work stream for the first time, it can be tricky knowing where to begin.
Start with this thought:
Not every alternative is a competitor.
This is a really important point to remember. Yes, there will be a lot of companies out there who do something similar to you, but there is likely only a handful who are actually playing in the same specific space.
These are the products you are vying against for the same business. The companies that your potential customers are referencing in Sales calls. The ones who come up as your most-compared-to products on comparison review sites.
Focus is key, so zoning in on a small group of companies that are truly your competitors is the essential first step. You can of course still keep an eye on other alternatives for inspiration, and to see how the market’s changing, but you’ll end up going round in circles if you’re always adding new options to your list of competitors.
What to track
Once you’ve agreed who your primary competitors are, you’ll need to determine which metrics and insights will actually be useful to you, your marketing team, and the wider company.
Sites like Similarweb are great at giving you a top level overview of key stats e.g…
Website traffic
Audience interests and behaviour
Website engagement
Top countries
Traffic breakdown per channel
Keywords they’re ranking for/targeting
On top of this, if your competitors’ market/category share and revenue stats are publicly available, you’ll want to document this. I also try to add in any qualitative insights I spot e.g. the lead H1 message on their homepage, whether they have any interesting investors, or if there’s a particular narrative they’re pursuing about their product.
SWOT up
But for product marketing specifically, I find one of the best exercises to do is a SWOT analysis of your product, as well as that of your main competition.
Create a table for each company or product and fill in these sections.
Strengths: What do they do well? Where are they winning?
Weaknesses: Where are they not strong? What are their customers’ biggest frustrations?
Opportunities: Looking to the future, is there any competitive edge or unique component that makes growth look promising?
Threats: What are the factors that could cause problems for each company? Is there anything unique to that company which could hinder its growth?
Doing this exercise not just for yourself but for your main competitors will give you a great insight into the likely mindset of your counterpart product marketing teams at these other companies.
Just as importantly, this exercise will really help with framing your positioning. By looking at where you and your competitors are strong (and where you’re not) you’ll have a sense of your place in the category - why you’re better than the rest and what makes you difference.
Share the love
Then, it’s all about getting those insights out there. Start some conversations.
Don’t worry too much about producing something perfect or exhaustive with your first attempt. Other teams will have follow up questions and their own observations about the competitor landscape, and you’ll be able to use all of this to transform your competitor analysis from being a one-off exercise to an always-on work stream that everyone in your company can dip into for the latest insights.
Give the SWOT framework a try and let me know how you get on.
👋
Rory