#7 / How Your Competitors Influence Your Marketing Message

When developing your marketing message, you must first understand your customers and your product so that you can explain how your offer solves their problems. However, there is one more party you must thoroughly investigate: your competition. Here are some of the reasons why you should spend some time researching your competitors when developing your marketing message:

Set Yourself Apart

The goal of your marketing message is to explain not only how you solve people's problems, but also how you do so uniquely. In other words, what distinguishes your offering from others on the market? To understand this, you have to understand what your competitors are offering in order to effectively differentiate yours.

Gain Insights

Investigating your competitors can provide you with information about your target market. You can see how they interact with their audience to generate ideas. Examine the pain points addressed in their marketing messages. Why are they acting in this manner? You don't want to steal their ideas, but you can use their content to gain a better understanding of your common audience.

Monitor Reputation

Insights can also be gained by observing how your target audience interacts with your competitors. Examine the comments on their social media posts or online product reviews, for example. Customers will be voicing their opinions and asking questions. You can sometimes find negative feedback and gain insights into market segments that your competitor does not serve well. You can then specify how you do in your marketing message.

Discover Trends

Your competitors can provide you with information about emerging trends and recent market changes. They might know something you don't. For example, you may notice their content employing a new industry buzzword or expanding into a new market segment.

Improve Your Content

Keeping an eye on your competitors can also help you with your content strategy. Examine the different types of content they produce and how they incorporate their marketing message into each. Once you've created your own marketing message, you'll need to plan out how you'll incorporate it into your content. You can make better decisions if you know what your competitors are doing.

For example, you might discover that your competitors aren’t using LinkedIn Live, and this is something you can do. You can also see which of their content is getting the most engagement and gain insights into why.

It takes a great deal of time, research, and careful consideration to craft the right marketing message, but this effort will pay off if done well. One crucial source of information in this process is your competition in the market.

?? Things That Inspired Me This Week

1. Podcast:?Indie Hackers. Pieter Levels shares his insights on juggling 70 projects and how it can lead to his greatest successes.
2. Video:?Free Keyword Research Course. No content strategy will be successful without understanding keyword research.

?? Quote of the Week

“‘That’s not my problem’ is possibly the worst thing people can think, whether they are starting an operation, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down a runway, or building a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper.”

From?The Checklist Manifesto?by Atul Gawande