How To Run A Competitor Check

Competitor analysis usually turns into a spreadsheet with forty rows that gets looked at once.

The useful version answers three questions: what are they promising, where are they getting attention, and what are they not doing.

Start by picking the right competitors

Not the five biggest names in the industry. The businesses you actually lose deals to.

Ask your sales team, or look at your own closed-lost records. The answer is frequently three or four names, and sometimes it includes "did it in house" or "did nothing", which are both real competitors and neither appears in a market report.

Four is enough. Ten is a research project.

Question one: what are they promising

Read their homepage and their main service page like a buyer, not like a marketer.

Write down, in one sentence each, what they say they do and who they say it is for. If you cannot do that in one sentence, neither can their prospects, and that is useful information about them.

Then look at what they lead with. Price? Speed? Experience? A guarantee? A specific industry? The thing at the top of the page is the thing they think wins.

If everyone in your set leads with the same thing, that space is crowded and expensive. If one of them leads with something nobody else does, they have found something.

Question two: where are they getting attention

Organic search. Which pages of theirs rank, and for what. Any keyword tool does this in five minutes and it is the single most informative view available. You will find they rank for things you never considered, and that they do not rank for things you assumed they owned.

Paid. The ad libraries on the major platforms are public. You can see what a competitor is running, for how long, and in which formats. An ad running for six months is working. That is the closest thing to free performance data you will ever get.

Social. Which platform they actually use, how often, and what gets engagement. Most B2B competitors post rarely and get nothing, which is a genuine opening.

Reviews and directories. Where they appear, how many reviews, and what the reviews complain about. The one-star reviews are the most useful document in the whole exercise, because they tell you exactly what their customers hate and what you could promise instead.

Question three: what are they not doing

This is the part that produces the decisions.

Nobody in your market doing video. Nobody answering the actual questions buyers ask. Nobody with a decent website. Nobody serving a specific segment properly. Nobody responding to enquiries within a day, which is more common than it sounds and worth knowing about.

The gap is the strategy. Everything else in the research is context for finding it.

What to do with it

One page. Three sections: what they promise, where they show up, where the gap is. Then three actions you are going to take as a result.

If the document does not end in actions, you did research instead of strategy.

How often

Once a year properly, and a quick check on the ad libraries every quarter, because that is where change shows up fastest.

Watching competitors weekly is a way of feeling busy. The market does not move that fast and you have your own work to do.