Bethan Vincent is an experienced marketer who has worked with a variety of firms in B2B SaaS and B2B Services and has now started marketing agency Open Velocity. Bethan believes in good competitor analysis and how we might get ahead of our competition by going out and finding out what's going on. We spoke about the joys of fractional marketing leadership, and some of the ways to get competitive analysis done.

A message from this episode's sponsor - Skiplevel

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Episode highlights: 1. Competitor Analysis is a simple concept, but doing it is hard

Your competitors are out there and, in many cases, there'll be interesting stuff on their websites but you need to use a variety of techniques to really get to the bottom of what they're doing.

2. You need to know your own target market & positioning before evaluating others

It may be Marketing 101, but it's important to understand the space you're playing in, the audience you're going after & who your direct & indirect competitors are before doing competitor research

3. It's important to have a hypothesis you want to test for your competitors

There are many tools and approaches you can use, but you need to know what question you're trying to answer. Just finding interesting "stuff" is... interesting, but maybe not particularly useful.

4. Just because a competitor is doing something doesn't mean they're being rational

Be aware of what competitors are up to, but blindly copying them is not a good strategy. You need to be in charge of your own destiny, be a leader and do things others can't replicate.

5. Product management should be considered a subset of marketing 🔥

"Product" is one of the many "Ps" in marketing. Product managers should care about packaging, positioning, pricing, promotions and all the rest. It's not just about what you build or how you build it.

Contact Bethan

You can catch up with Bethan on LinkedIn or Twitter as well as apparently TikTok if you're into that sort of thing. Make sure to check out Open Velocity too.