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Competitor Analysis
Most competitor research stops at a feature comparison table nobody opens again. We take apart how the companies in your category actually win customers — which channels they buy, what they claim, what they charge, and where their argument is weakest — and turn that into a position you can defend.
Overview
Map how your category actually acquires customers, and find the position nobody is defending.
What a useful competitor analysis actually looks at
A competitor’s website tells you what they want you to think. Their acquisition tells you what is working. We look at both, but we weight the second far more heavily.
That means their paid search footprint and which keywords they defend, the ad creative they have been running longest — length of run is the strongest public signal that something converts — their organic footprint and which pages actually earn traffic, the offers and pricing they lead with, and the objections their own copy keeps pre-empting. Copy that repeatedly answers a question tells you which question is costing them deals.
Direct, indirect and the status quo
The competitor list clients give us is almost always too short. It contains the companies they lose deals to and none of the alternatives buyers actually consider.
We map three tiers. Direct competitors solve the same problem the same way. Indirect competitors solve the same problem differently — a spreadsheet, an in-house hire, a freelancer, an adjacent tool with a workaround. And doing nothing, which in most categories is the largest single competitor by volume. If your messaging only argues against tier one, you are fighting for a fraction of the market and ignoring the rest.
Finding the gap worth owning
The output is not a list of things competitors do well. It is a specific recommendation about which position is available, defensible, and worth wanting.
A gap qualifies on three tests. Somebody has to want it — there must be real demand for the thing nobody is claiming. You have to be able to substantiate it, because a position you cannot prove collapses on first contact with a sceptical buyer. And it has to be awkward for competitors to copy, usually because their existing business model, pricing or customer base makes the claim inconvenient for them. A gap that fails any of those three is a slogan, not a position.
What's included
The scope of the engagement, stated plainly so there is nothing to discover later.
- Acquisition channel teardown across paid search, paid social, SEO and content
- Ad creative library review, weighted by how long each asset has run
- Offer, pricing and packaging comparison across the direct set
- Messaging and claim audit through each competitor's full funnel
- Share-of-voice estimate on the keywords that matter commercially
- Three-tier competitor map: direct, indirect and the status quo
- The specific positioning gap we recommend you own, with the reasoning
How we run it
The order matters more than the individual tasks. Doing these out of sequence is what wastes months.
Define the real competitive set
We start from your lost deals and your search results, not from the list in your pitch deck. That usually adds two or three names nobody had counted and removes one that never actually competes.
Teardown
Channel by channel, we document how each competitor acquires customers and what they spend attention defending. Ad libraries, keyword overlap, content footprint, pricing pages, onboarding flows.
Claim and objection audit
Every substantive claim each competitor makes, and every objection their copy works to pre-empt. Repeated pre-emption marks the soft spots in their argument.
Gap analysis and recommendation
We test candidate positions against demand, provability and how hard they are to copy, then recommend one — with the evidence behind it and the argument against the runners-up.
What you get
Concrete artefacts you keep, whether or not the engagement continues.
- Competitor teardown document with per-rival channel and claim analysis
- Three-tier competitive map
- Keyword and share-of-voice overlap table
- Ad creative pattern summary with longest-running assets flagged
- Positioning gap recommendation with supporting evidence
- Working session to walk your team through the findings
Common questions
The questions that come up most often on discovery calls.
How many competitors do you analyse?
Typically five to eight in depth, plus a wider scan of the indirect set. Going deeper on fewer beats a shallow pass across twenty — the value is in reading their acquisition properly, and that takes time per company.
Do you use paid tools for this?
Yes, alongside primary observation. Third-party estimates for traffic and keyword data are directional rather than exact, so we treat them as one input and verify the commercially important findings against ad libraries, live search results and your own data.
Is this a one-off or ongoing?
The full teardown is a one-off; it takes weeks and the conclusions hold for a while. What changes faster is creative and offers, so clients on retainer get a lighter quarterly refresh that watches for new entrants, pricing moves and messaging shifts.
What if we do not know who our competitors are?
That is a normal starting point, and finding out is part of the work. Search results, review-site alternatives pages, and asking recent buyers what else they evaluated will surface the real set quickly — often including names you had never heard of.
How is this different from a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT is a summary format. This is research. A SWOT tells you what you already believe, arranged in four boxes; competitor analysis of this kind is meant to change what you believe, which is why the output is a recommendation with evidence rather than a grid.
Related work
This sits inside our Go-To-Market Strategy practice.
Want this done properly?
Start with a discovery call. We will tell you whether competitor analysis is actually your bottleneck, or whether something else should come first.