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Competitor Research Part one
Zoltàn Erkel
March 13, 2023
Heeey there,
So last week we talked about the basics of ABM & what you need to get started [if you’ve missed it, check out this visual summary]
We will likely cover ABM and growth Marketing in the upcoming weeks in more detail…
but today we’ll go through 2 parts of a 4 part series on doing competitor research.
We are also adding 2 short videos on how to utilise scraping and AI to understand what people don’t like about your competition, and»
We are also giving you 2 free templates 🤩
Topic Overview:
Understanding your competition’s growth model 👩🔬
How to select the right competition for research 🕵️♂️
How to scrape bad reviews on your competitors 👨💻
How to summarise the reviews using ChatGPT 🦾
The competitor template we use for research 💾
Part 1: Understanding the growth model of your competition 👩🔬
If you look at how a company grows at a high level, you'll find that there are 4 models that it needs to fit in order to grow.
Unsurprisingly this is called the 4-model fit, and it was developed by Brian Balfour [Founder/CEO of Reforge, previously VP of Growth @ HubSpot].
These are the 4 pieces you'll need to figure out in order to understand how your competitors are growing:
The Market: What market segments and customers are they going after?
The Product: What product or service are they selling towards those segments? [How are they communicating the value towards the market?]
The Model: How are their customers paying them? [& How much?]
The Channel: How are they attracting those customers?
credits: Brian Balfour
If you want to know how your competitors are growing, these are the 4 things you want to discover during your competitor research.
As mentioned, today we’ll only focus on 2 parts of the equation, and we will continue with the: The Market
Part 2 How to select your competitors for your research 🕵️♂️
The Market:
If you don’t know who you are competing with, you don’t know what to research.
But there is a mistake companies make before running their competitor analysis
» Lacking segmentation.
If you don’t segment your market and Ideal Customer Profile before you start running your analysis, you will burn through your resources.
Why?
You’ll end up creating a huge list of companies that might not even be relevant to research.
Or you won’t understand what you need to document when creating your research.
This is why Market Segmentation and Ideal Customer Profiling come before or during our growth marketing audit.
Let’s take Albacross as an example to run this analysis.
Albacross is an online tool that automagically identifies companies visiting your website, creates new opportunities in your CRM and helps you with relevant information to close more deals.
In order to run a competitor analysis, your company needs to align around 3 things.
The 3 foundations of competitor research
1. Market Segments & Customer Profile (Who)
Which market segment are you going after and who are you targeting within those segments?
Competitor Research by Ricardo Ghekiere
If you look at customers interested in the technology of Albacross you can think of a few segments, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s start with two of them.
Agencies use the software to provide a better return on investment in their campaigns for their clients.
B2B Software Companies use the software to close more B2B deals.
Within a few sentences, you can quickly see that each segment will buy your product for different reasons.
This is why the first step in creating any B2B campaign starts with proper segmentation and creating an Ideal Customer Profile.
2. Problems faced (What)
Once you know the segment of customers you are going after, it’s time to understand their problems.
Based on the two segments above, you can clearly see that the same exact software could target different niches and solve different problems with the same product.
Agency owners would want to partner up with the software to increase client retention and show a clear return on investment to their clients.
On the other hand, a VP of Marketing of a B2B Software Company doesn’t really care about client retention, it cares about closing more B2B deals.
This is the power of segmentation.
Now that you have a clear segmentation, your team can better understand which segments it really cares about and who you are competing with to solve the same problem.
Here is an example of a segment I focus on and the most common problems they face.
Make sure to use the templates provided in the LinkedIn Content Marketing Ebook, to deep-dive into each segment.
The next phase is pretty obvious. How are you solving the problems you have defined by talking to your Ideal Customer Profile?
Based on these answers you are now able to segment your competitors into 4 categories.
The 4 categories of picking your competitors.
Based on these answers above, you are now able to segment your competitors in 4 categories.
The who, what and how of competitor research provides the basis for the 4 competitor segments 👇
1. Direct Competitors
Same customer, same problem, same solution.
2. Different problem competitors
Same customer, same solution, different problem.
3. Different customer competitors
Same solution, same problem, different customer.
4. Different product category competitors
Same problem, same customer, different product.
Here is how this would look like if we would take Uber as an example.
Competitor Research by Ricardo Ghekiere
Lyft = A direct competitor of Uber that solves the exact same problem sells to the same customer and offers the same solution.
Doordash = Food delivery at home from your favourite restaurants. They sell to the same customer
Zum = One-stop partner for student transportation.
In your first competitor research, your focus should be on your direct competitors to understand who you are competing with and how they are growing their business.
Once you take your research a step further.
Keep in mind that the most dangerous competitors are those that sell to the same target customer.
Why?
It’s a lot easier to provide extra services or products to an existing customer base compared to selling to a different segment.
This is why I am always amazed when companies are creating new products for different target audiences before nailing one segment.
The investment to go after a new segment never comes cheap.
Do your 3-5 direct competitors?
Time to deep-dive and find hidden growth opportunities.
Because why would you reinvent the wheel, if all you have to do is make it better?
How to scrape bad reviews on your competitors 👨💻
video tutorial 👉https://www.loom.com/share/1d1e5177fa3e4f0a852c061573439456
As you’ll see my smart mate, Thibaut, has put together a tutorial.🤓
He shows you how to scrape reviews from Trustpilot, but of course, you can run the same sequence on other review sites too (let us know if you need help with this).
Here is our template with the example in the video.
You’ll use this tool https://phantombuster.com/automations/toolbox/6776/web-element-extractor.
Let’s run through the steps of the tutorial.
Step 0.: Create a file in Google Sheets [Excel/Notion etc.] to store reviews
Step 1.: Open up a review site like Trustpilot G2, Capterra etc.
Step 2.: Search for your competitor
Step 3.: Select reviews from 3 stars and below (or in case there are 10, 5 and below)
Step 4.: Expand the results to see as many on a page as possible
Step 5.: Copy the link of each review page onto your sheet (all the pages of 1-3 star reviews) » you can find & rewrite the page number in the link and copy/paste until you’ve got all
Step 6.: Make the sheet Editable to anyone with the link and copy its link
Step 7.: Add the link to Phantom
Step 8.: Go back to the review site and open up your inspect tool [CMD + SHIFT + C in Chrome]
Step 9.: Select the “Selector tool” (the thing with the arrow top left) and click on the paragraph of a review
Step 10.: Copy the paragraph, paste it into the CSS selector in Phantom Buster, and delete everything before “p.typography”
Step 11.: Give it a Name and description and set up how to Launch it [it’s super straightforward, select what suits you] - select “ create a new file”
Step 12.: Launch the Phantom
Step 13.: Once it runs, click on “More” and copy the link, then go back to the sheet
Step 14.: Type ‘=importdata(“paste the link here”)’ into an empty place [you need the “inside the brackets)
Step 15.: Select everything that you’ve just imported, copy it, and paste it in the same place with “paste special » paste only values” so you may modify the data easily
How to summarise the reviews using ChatGPT 🦾
video tutorial 👉https://www.loom.com/share/359ff9b525e4489c930e1e5cc5f2fc2d
So now that we have our summaries scraped, it’s time to summarise them so that we are not doomed to read a billion customer reviews on a sheet.
Here is our template with the example in the video [same one as above].
You’ll use this tool: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/cargo/635545301111
Let’s run through the steps again.
Step 0.: Create a new tab in your Sheet where you’ll run the AI
Step 1.: Copy all of the reviews you’ve scraped and paste them onto the new tab in a column » name them on the top for e.g. “reviews”
Step 2.: Open the extension and install it
Step 3.: Run the “Cargo” add-on & if it’s your first time visit the link to the API key generator
Step 4.: Generate a key, copy it to Cargo, then login with Google/Microsoft [if you are logged in with multiple Google accs. then open an incognito page and login w/ the account you want to use]
Step 5.: Search for the “Reviews Summary” Template or add a new Prompt [you can check out how to do that here]
Step 6.: Enter the number of the rows in the “from” & “to” boxes to select which reviews you want to run the summary on
Step 7.: Enter a name in an adjacent column for the summaries for e.g. “summaries” » add this to the “output attribute” in Cargo [it’s case sensitive so copy&paste the name]
Step 8.: Run it & check out the summaries » if they are wrong then see if you can fix the prompt [you’ll find Thibaut’s promt in the template below]
The competitor template we use for research 💾
LinkedIn posts worth reading this week:
1. 5 Lessons Learned when evolving from a Sales Led to a Product Led model
Frederic Linfjärd has been experimenting with different growth models for ~20 years. It pays to listen to his learnings.
2. How someone built a $500M beer brand starting in 2015.
An interesting tale about recognizing opportunities in Red Sea markets.
3. Get comfortable with knowing: that your measurement of success will be flawed
Liam Bartholomew the VP of marketing at Cognism explains why you won't be able to draw a straight line in your attribution model when it comes to Demand Generation.
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