How to Do Competitor Research for B2B & B2C? (As a Writer)

Imagine! Michael Scott is your boss in real life. He never respects your boundaries, harasses you at every chance he gets, and bullies your coworkers at work. To add to the list, he’s misogynistic and racist, with the worst management skills and annoying habits.

One day, he assigns you a writing task, and no help is provided. You don’t know who is the audience you’re writing for, you have 0 knowledge of who the competitors are, and then you fail miserably in giving your copy a purpose. Writing a copy not knowing who your product/service competitors are — what else can come off it? After brainstorming for a long time, being unable to put your research into words, and hours of hard work, Michael Scott finally shows up. He comes to you and teaches you how to do competitor research before planning your copy on a whiteboard with a marker. Then hands you over a napkin where a step-by-step method is scribbled in a flow chart!

I’m writing from a memory that haunted me for a long time, but in the end, I learned how to do competitor research from a writer’s perspective for good!

Step 1: Step into This Direction INWARDS ⏩OUTWARDS

Before you think about the competitors, learn on what basis you’re competing with them. Understand the core of your products or services — what is that you are offering to the audience and why. In terms of services, clarify what the benefits that these people will be going to enjoy are. What problems/issues can get resolved with your offering?

Go through the brand assets — values, recognition, visual representation, product features, and core systems, ask for a demo, watch the free trial, ask the right questions and get your hands on whatever you get.

Step 2: Productize the Services & Benefits, Core Systems

✨✨This is especially applicable to service-based businesses. While doing your research, always try to treat the offered services as individual products. Learn how the core systems work, the mode of reaching out to clients, and what are the processes or prerequisites of using the particular service.

Example: If you work for any service-based company, you can take its most prevalent offerings and create a solution in your copy to suit their customer’s needs. B2B businesses where a company is helping other companies with their solutions — this model works fine; in fact, you can use this for some of the B2C cases also.

To help the process read this article by Neil Patel.

Step 3: Understanding the Target Audience is Godly🤑

The simplest way to go about it — First, get to the core of the products and systems

Then, learn about those people looking for these products or who might be interested in them even for a while.

It can be a B2B or a B2C scenario — it doesn’t matter!

Conduct research based on industries, humans, and agencies who’d be willing to use your services.

Suppose you work at an Ed Tech company (Which I do), and you have to write a blog about one of their education product this week- what is the next question you should be asking?

Who are the students/educators we’re reaching out to/targeting?

To dive into that you have to look for different demographics — say the blog is for students between the ages of 15–20, studtying in school or college, want to pursue a particular career say marketing.

Read this article to know more!

Step 4: Challenges ⏩ Pain Points (Look Beyond the Scarcity)

An essential part of understanding the target audience is learning what kind of problems or challenges they might go through in everyday life — think in the line of the service you are providing.

Only then will you be able to add/use these issues to your copy; based on that; your Content plan can be dedicated to these challenges.

Step 5: Helping the Audience Through Your Writing

Solving your audience’s problems is the top priority.

When drafting a content strategy or writing your first email drip, you can design the copy to provide a viable solution to the audience based on the pain points. Tweak it with and offers complimentary benefits to make it more exciting.

HubSpot would be the perfect example of this particular step. The blogs, templates, ebooks, and case studies they provide are based on helpful tips, which is the base of their entire content strategy.

Take this blog about marketing plans as an instance; besides giving out free templates, they are helping their potential audience base to perform well.

Step 6: Final Showdown: The Competitor Research

You might be thinking, at this point, where the focus topic kicks in?

Well, each and every stage I’ve discussed until now will lead you to a more in-depth and analytical approach to knowing about the ‘Competitors’.

Once you know the products, the features, the benefits, the USP, and the target market- you can now figure out the competitors. Based on your knowledge, you can learn through your competitors, and you’ll know what they are doing now.

Read this blog from Buffer to have a more clear idea about it.

By knowledge, I mean — what they are doing in terms of marketing initiatives, sales offerings, and lots more.

The latter part comes easy -Innovate your unique offer to stand out!

Ps: No, the competitor research is not that simple. But I wanted to give you a basic idea of what to do, in case you need it (As a Writer).

If you liked this Newsletter in any way, you could share it with your followers :) This was the very first edition of ‘Sparkling Water’ 😎. Stay tuned as I come back next Saturday!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.