Let’s face it. It’s Friday. You’re not going to start that new strategy one-pager you’ve been meaning to do all week.Â
How about we try something that’ll only take a couple of hours and give you some genuinely useful insights?
Know your competitors
As you’ll remember from your product marketing framework, once you’ve got a better grasp of who your customer is, and what they want from your product, you’ll need to understand your competition.Â
My top tip for getting started with analysis is to go sign up for one or two of your main competitors, and spend a few hours kicking the tyres on their product.Â
No matter what size of company you are, it’s important to avoid going ‘echo chamber’ and only using your own product. You need to be aware of your product’s shortcomings, and appreciate that competitors will do certain things better than you. This will help keep you and your team humble and ambitious.Â
Give ‘em a try
Sign up for a competitor service and ask these questions.
What’s their homepage message? How are they positioning themselves compared to you?
What’s the sign up and onboarding experience like?
Is their first time user experience better than yours?
Do they have features you don’t have?
Do some of their features beat yours on quality, design, or innovation?
What are the onboarding emails like?
How good is their customer support?
There’ll be a ton of insights you can bring back to your Product team, to help inform the roadmap.
Improve your positioning
Plus it’ll keep your marketing messaging in check.Â
There’s no point calling out the competition and saying an industry needs fixing, or a rival’s feature is inferior, if that simply isn’t the case. As a product marketer, you need to speak to users about problems they actually have - not just problems you’d like them to have.Â
This is a dumb example but if you were launching a new brand of forks, you wouldn’t go with ‘Eating made easy’ because you’ve tried other forks, and you know eating food is already very easy. You’re creating a false problem. I’d probably have to go with ‘Let’s get forked up’ instead…
Toot your own horn
Testing out the competition is also a great way of discovering what your product does better than the rest.Â
As you explore other services, you’ll most likely spot some features your competitors are missing, and others where yours are clearly superior. They might even be simple features that you’ve taken for granted.
A while ago, the Whereby marketing team was doing this very exercise and held its weekly meeting on Zoom as a one-off. Sure, they did some things better than us, but we instantly spotted one obvious area where we outclassed them.
As everyone waited to join the call, this is what they were left staring at.Â
For comparison, this is what someone sees when they’re waiting to join a Whereby room.
We realised our product team had developed something really special with the pre-call experience on Whereby. Guests are provided with a bunch of information about the host. And the ability to check yourself out before the call, and actively ‘Knock’ when you’re ready, makes people feel more prepared for joining a meeting.Â
We took this insight, and made much more of our pre-call experience, and set about shouting about Whereby’s Waiting Rooms from the rooftops.Â
So, checking out the competition isn’t just useful for spotting your own your areas for improvement. You’ll also get some great inspiration for how to promote your product.
Give it a try today and let me know how you get on.Â
Cheers! 👋