How well do you know your competition? How much insight do you have into their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning?
The key to answering these questions and more lies within a competitive analysis.
What is a competitive analysis?
It’s a process involving identifying your business’ competitors (both direct and indirect) and conducting research on these companies to gain deeper insight into their business, including their products, sales tactics, and marketing strategies.
Conducting a competitive analysis can provide a ton of benefits for your business, including:
- Identifying your company/product’s unique value proposition – researching the competition can assist you in determining what really sets your organization apart from the competition. It can also help you validate any perceived value proposition.
- Informing future marketing efforts – knowing what sets your company apart from the pack is valuable information and can be purposely used to differentiate your brand from others in the market.
- Determining your competitors’ strengths – Yes, it’s important to know what the competition does well, along with areas where they outperform industry standards. This information can help you set goals or help you identify other strategic areas to focus on for differentiation.
- Determining your competitors’ weaknesses – On the other hand, a competitive analysis also tells you where your competitors are falling short, giving you opportunities to take advantage of areas they have neglected and test out new, unique marketing strategies.
- Find out what’s missing from the market – By analyzing competitors, you can gain valuable insights into what’s missing from the market or in a competitor’s product and use this information to enhance your own product features.
- Benchmark your efforts – Finally, conducting competitive analysis provides you with a benchmark for goal-setting. Benchmarking data from direct and indirect competitors can be used to measure your company’s growth against realistic results, ensuring that your business is always improving and staying ahead of the competition.
Competitive analysis is an extremely powerful tool. But, despite all the benefits, many organizations just don’t do it.
How come? For some, it’s just a lack of time. Traditional methods of research can be time-consuming and costly. For others, it could be a lack of understanding of the benefits of good research or there’s no formal process in place. Even with great articles that take a deep dive into how to conduct a competitive analysis, some companies still miss the mark.
But what if conducting a competitive analysis was as simple as asking the right questions?
In this article, we’ll explore how to use ChatSpot – the AI-driven app from HubSpot – for easier competitive analysis.
A quick note before we dive in – if you haven’t set up ChatSpot yet, you’ll want to read “How to Get Started Using ChatSpot and Content Assistant: The AI-Powered Apps from HubSpot” first. It provides step-by-step instructions for how to get started.
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5 Must-Try ChatSpot Prompts to Research Your Competition
ChatSpot is your handy helper from HubSpot that has the power to radically simplify the time-consuming research tasks associated with competitive analysis.
To get you started on your AI-powered competitive analysis, here are five research prompts to try with ChatSpot:
1. Identify the Competition
The first step to any competitive analysis is knowing who the competition is. The answer might seem obvious, but you may be surprised by who ChatSpot determines you’re competing with. It can also help you divide your competition into direct and indirect categories for further analysis.
Prompt to try: “List the top competitors for [Insert name of company]”
2. Competitor PPC Research
PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is most effective when it’s backed by research. ChatSpot can tell you what keywords your competitors are bidding on, allowing you to identify new opportunities they’re missing.
Prompt to try: “What PPC keywords does [insert company url] buy?”
3. Search Engine Marketing Summary
Would you like to know how a competitor ranks on Google? Ask ChatSpot and it will provide a complete Search Engine Marketing summary, including PPC spend, traffic (organic and paid), keywords, organic search value, and search traffic ranking for any of your competitors.
Prompt to try: “Search Engine Marketing Summary for [insert name of competitor]”
4. Keyword Research
One of the most important cornerstones of your SEO strategy just got easier. With the help of ChatSpot, you can find target keywords, competitor keywords, and even determine which keywords deliver the most traffic.
Prompt to try: “Give me a keyword report for [Insert your company Url]”
5. Domain Research
Domain research can help you gain valuable details about a site and its domain name, including contact information, registration history, and the number of previous owners (a lot of owners can indicate spam). Domain research is a must if your organization is interested in purchasing the domain for an upcoming web expansion, product launch, event, etc. For our competitive analysis, it’s more about understanding the domains your competition owns.
Whatever the reason, domain search can be made easy by utilizing ChatSpot!
Prompt to try: “Who owns the domain [insert domain]”
More Inspiration – ChatSpot Prompt Library
These prompts will help speed up the time it takes to analyze your competitors, but there’s an almost unlimited number of use cases for ChatSpot, including writing better blog articles faster, creating reports from your HubSpot data, and more.
For even more powerful prompts to try, browse through the ChatSpot prompt library. The prompt library includes a single, filterable library organized by topic, making it a breeze to find the perfect prompt for your needs. The library contains dozens of prompts you can experiment with, and HubSpot is adding new ones all of the time. It’s an excellent starting point for getting familiar with ChatSpot and finding inspiration for your own effective prompts.
Another fantastic resource for ChatSpot prompts is the HubSpot Community, where marketers, salespeople, and service teams are sharing their fresh ideas all the time.
Putting It All Together
If you want to gain a good understanding of your competition without the time commitment of a traditional competitive analysis, you need to start leveraging ChatSpot. It’s the best way for any business to understand the market, determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, and establish benchmarks to set goals against.
If you haven’t started using ChatSpot yet, I encourage you to start exploring the endless possibilities of ChatSpot today. You’ll soon discover how it can transform the way you work with HubSpot. Happy exploring!
