Now you’ve got a good grasp of who your target audience is: you know how they buy, you know how they learn, and you know what they want. You understand what makes them your target audience and nobody else.

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Next, you want to figure out how your competitors approach selling to your audience via the messages and campaigns you serve them. This helps you develop a messaging and campaign approach that’s different from and more effective than your competitors.

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But does it really need to be different? Every marketing team has experienced this: a competitor puts out a new promotion, then your CEO sees it and takes it personally. ‘Look, they’re doing a podcast. Why aren’t we doing a podcast? We need to make podcasting a priority!”

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‘Everybody else is doing it so why can’t we?’ is a quality Cranberries album, but an unadvised knee-jerk response to your competitors’ latest moves.

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Whenever I see something decent that a competitor has put live, I think, ‘Dammit, why aren’t we doing that!?’ Most content marketers are hyper-critical of their blind spots. Or at least they think they are. In fact, they’re just paranoid. You’re not seeing your competitor’s strategy, you’re just seeing part of their output. And copying the output of a strategy you don’t understand could be a big waste of time.

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But if everyone’s doing, for example, a podcast then surely something is going right, and you are missing out by not doing the same? Yes, potentially. It helps to reframe ‘everyone’s doing it’ as two separate things, one good, and one bad.

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1. The Good ‘Everybody’s doing it’: A change in audience behaviors means that your prospects are consuming information in a new way, and there’s demand for a new type of content.
2. The Bad ‘Everybody’s doing it’: A well-known brand is having obvious success with a certain content format, and lots of other brands are piling in with their copycat version.

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‘The Good’ presents a good opportunity to start a new content campaign. ‘The Bad’... not so much. Often both are true at once, so you’ll need to gauge your ability to resource and deliver a new format of high-quality, differentiated content.

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One thing’s for sure: copying everything your competitors are doing only works if you have very deep pockets and a Zen-like tolerance for failure. I’m guessing that’s not the case.

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But by no means ignore your competition. They may have found a channel or an approach that you can benefit from too. If you follow the same process with a differentiated message that’s more targeted to your audience, you might get a better result.

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This worked for ContentCal, where we opened two new channels: Linkedin and organic search, by looking closely at how competitors reached audiences there. By consistently pitching new content formats that were either different from or better than what our competitors offered, we grew sign upsfrom search via the blog by more than 100 per month and achieved more than one million organic impressions on Linkedin.

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How did we figure out what would work? Let’s go through that step-by-step. I’ll assume you already know who your competitors are, based on who comes up most when you’re pitching new business, and whoever your customers mentioned during your interviews.

Competitor Analysis, step-by-step

1.   Competitor keyword analysis

Even if you don’t think search is going to be a key channel for your business, I’d recommend doing some quick keyword analysis, just to understand the language buyers use when they’re talking about your space.

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If you’re selling a new type of software, it may make sense to position it in line with an existing tool that your audience already knows about and searches for. It’s good to get a feel for what commercial terms are successful, both in terms of what folk are searching for, and what keywords competitors are prepared to spend on, even if it’s not a perfect match with what your software does.

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You’ll need a keyword analysis tool to do this. Most have free trials so you can test them risk-free. I use a tool called Spyfu, which is pretty good value, and allows you to see competitors' organic and paid keywords for several different regions. Other tools give a more finely tuned analysis that could be helpful if search marketing features big in your content strategy.

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When you have access, export all organic and paid keywords for each relevant region for your own and your competitors’ domains, then filter by terms with some level of commercial intent that drive search traffic. At this stage, we’re only interested in search terms that are directly related to the problem your software solves (e.g. ‘schedule social content’), or to the software itself (e.g. ‘content calendar’).

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By doing this simple analysis, you’ll understand the opportunity to drive new business via search, and you’ll understand the language customers use to solve problems and find tools like yours.

2.  Competitor message hierarchies

When you look at your competitors’ sites, what do you see? What’s the most important information you can learn from them?

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At first, these are difficult questions to answer. But just like on your site, there’s a logical sequence to the messages they share. We’ll ignore branding and design for now, because messaging is the main thing that makes people want to buy.

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Unless your competitors’ sites are a mess or they are attempting something unusual, their messages will probably flow from ‘highest priority’ at the top of the homepage, down to ‘lowest priority’ at the bottom. These top-to-bottom messages link together to form a sales narrative, which is basically the complete argument they’re making for someone to buy their software.

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Because this argument is in plain sight, it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer their message hierarchy. Just go through your competitors’ sites to list out their top 10 messages in priority order. It’s a bit like hacking into their Head of Marketing’s Macbook and pinching their messaging framework but without the moral bankruptcy.

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I’d recommend building two ‘message priority’ lists for each competitor:

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1. Benefit-led messages: These describe the change the software brings.
2. Feature-led messages: These describe what the software does.

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These lists show you how your competitors are appealing to the change their customers want to see in their life, along with how they practically describe how their software works. The why and the what are two important elements we’ll pin down in your messaging later in the book.

3.  Competitor positioning maps

Now’s the time for a bit of lateral thinking. To distinguish how you can make your marketing memorable and unique in the eyes of your audience, you’ll want to put together a couple of competitor maps: one for messaging, and one for branding.

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Marketers joke online about how consultants make up any old axis values that will make their company look special with these charts.

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That’s kind of the point! Because we’re telling a story about how our product is different, you do have to exaggerate your unique qualities, just like your messaging will. At the same time, these claims need to be believable.

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To get started, take the two highest priority qualities that make your customer buy, and make these the labels for the X and Y axis. You should already know what these are from your customer interviews.

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Then you can plot your current position on the charts, along with your competitors. Add an arrow that shows where you want to end up, or in other words, where the opportunity is. By this point, you should see how your customer interviews and competitor analysis are coming together to improve the focus of your marketing and content efforts.

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Here’s an example populated with bogus startup brands. For the purpose of this positioning map, you’re the founder of Kerplunk.io, in case you’re wondering.

Next, build another comparison chart that compares your competitors’ approach to branding, and identifies opportunities for you to appeal more to your audience. By branding, I just mean ‘look and feel’, which is probably not a definition a branding expert would agree with, but keeping things simple does serve a purpose here.

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Just like messaging, your branding structures and shares information about your company and software. For example, a simple, clean look and feel could suggest an easy-to-use product. While a darker look and feel could suggest an exclusive product or a break from the status quo.

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If it wasn’t already obvious, I like thinking about messaging and branding as prioritized structures of information that combine to make a compelling argument to buy. Although I’m sure some people think this detracts from the magic of creativity, I prefer to be as logical and focused as possible before introducing creative approaches within this framework.

4.  Competitor acquisition channels

This is the fun bit. With help from competitor analysis tools, you’re able to view the digital marketing channels your competitors are active on and see which drives the most traffic to their site. These tools also offer a window to the messages and creative they’re putting in front of their audience.

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For market entrants, the main advantage of these tools is that you’re able to see whether there’s a promising acquisition channel that you can use to attract new customers. Why figure everything out for yourself when your competitors have already done the hard work for you?

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You could also find that your competitors neglect channels your audience are active on or produce content that’s poorly aligned to what your audience wants to watch, listen to, or read about. Apply what you already know about customer behavior from the interviews you’ve hosted to spot opportunities that your competitors haven’t.

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Here’s how:

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1. Decide which competitors you want to investigate and find their site URLs.
2. Use a tool like SimilarWeb to run an analysis using each of these URLs. Many tools do this, but with a free seven-day trial, SimilarWeb is a safe bet.
3. Then look at your competitor's traffic analysis. What channels are your competitors using to drive traffic to their sites? What’s the volume and spread of traffic across these channels?

Despite everything I’ve said so far about the importance of taking a differentiated approach, doing what your competitors are doing channel-wise works pretty well. That’s because there are usually only a few really effective ways to reach your target audience, and your competitors have probably already figured that out.

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Channels like search and social have also been built to offer users a richer experience by hosting a variety of content from different publishers. So as long as your content lands, there’s a space for you in the top 10 Google search results or at the top of strangers’ Linkedin feeds.

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Now we’ll build a complete view of the channels your competitors are active on. Competitor analysis tools tend to lack specifics, so you can unearth the details of what your competitors are up to on each channel like this:

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1. Linkedin Ads: On every business’s company Linkedin page you can find the ads they’re running now.
2. Linkedin Organic: Are they posting regularly to Linkedin? Check their Linkedin company page. To find out whether individuals from their company are posting from their personal accounts, search within Linkedin for your competitors’ company names and see whose posts pop up.
3. Facebook and Instagram Ads: Search for your competitors via Meta’s Ad Library
4. Outbound Sales: Go to the company’s Linkedin page. Search for ‘sales’ within the company’s ‘People’ section. How many people appear? If it’s more than 20% of the total employee count, it’s likely your competitor is running outbound sales campaigns.
5. Events and Webinars: Are they promoting anything on their social channels or site?
6. Paid Search: Does a search for competitor keywords on a tool like Spyfu show that they’re bidding on any terms?
7. Google Organic Search: What does a keyword research tool like Spyfu show for your competitors’ organic terms? If there are only a handful of pages that get decent traffic, your competitors probably haven’t invested much in search content. If you see lots of pages rank well, especially in subfolders like /blog or /resource, then the opposite is true.
8. PR: Google your competitor’s name and filter by the ‘News’ tab. When you’ve been through each channel for each competitor, you’ll be able to build a comparison table in Excel or a visual one like this:

To see the content your competitors are launching, look at the content posted on the channels you’ve already identified. Screenshot as you go and build a slide to summarize what each competitor is doing.

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1. Who is the content targeting? A generic audience or a clearly defined audience?
2. Does their activity operate mostly at the top of the funnel (building awareness) or at the bottom of the funnel (driving leads)?
3. Does any messaging vary from the homepage? What other messages are they testing?
4. What themes or industry debates are they weighing in on with their content? Is there anything obvious that they’re not talking about?
5. How do their channels fit together? Does their content link how they help their audience learn about their problem to how their software solves it for them?
6. Based on the interviews you’ve done with customers, how do you expect their content to perform?
7. Can you see evidence of any content campaigns that have launched and been abandoned, such as a podcast or newsletter?
8. Do you get the feeling they are reliant on outbound sales and low-intent leads for their sales team to chase, e.g. they gate most content and have a large sales team?
9. Is their content a bit dull? Does it look like run-of-the-mill B2B marketing?
10. Is their content practical and actionable, e.g. tools and how-to guides? Or is it vague and theoretical?
11. Do they promote a cause or mission that resonates with your customers?

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Your answers to these questions will help you identify opportunities to launch content that better serves your audience than what’s already out there. And so will these questions, which you should ask of your own business:

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• Can you compete like-for-like with your competitors’ output with the team and budget you have now?
• How can you improve on what they’ve already done?
• What will make your content different and more likely to attract or convert your audience?
• Do you see any opportunities to launch content on a different channel that your audience is active on, like Youtube Shorts?
• What do you have access to that your competitor doesn’t have, that you can turn into content? This could be a methodology, a tool, an expert’s insight, or a different view of your industry.
• What are the limits of your analysis? What else do you need to know before you invest time in a channel or approach? How can you find this out quickly?

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Now we understand who your target audience is; how they learn and make buying decisions, and we know how your competitors are trying to reach them. Or in other words, we understand the ‘Audience’ part of the Audience + Message + Campaign = New business equation.

We also have the background we need to develop messaging that puts you in the best possible position to win customers with content, which is exactly what we’ll do next.