Going Viral: Mastering Competitor Analysis with ChatGPT Prompts

AI tools like ChatGPT are first and foremost great for helping you with your marketing research, ideation process and analysis. And trying to analyze your competition is no different. Using the right prompts you can get a pretty good overview who your competition is, their strengths and weaknesses compared to your own company. In this article I will give you a couple of ChatGPT prompts that will give you a better insight in your market and your competition.

Whether you´re a small time blogger, niche website owner or you´re the head of a midsized Saas company, knowing your competition should be part of your overall marketing strategy.

A competition analysis can help you with the following:

• Actually getting to know who your main competitors are
• Which position your own company has in the market
• Researching the strong points and weak points of your competition
• The strong and weak points of your own company
• How your customers/audience see your company compared to the competition
• Where there are gaps in your content 

Where to start with ChatGPT Competitor Analysis

First off, in order to have ChatGPT give you results you actually can use, you need to offer it information that is both as detailed and concise as possible. But preferably not too elaborate and long winded at the same time.

Remember, ChatGPT is still a chatbot at heart. Meaning that it won’t process information the same way as a normal, living human being would. However, if you give the AI Tool concise commands, also called ‘prompts’,  you will be amazed by the results.

In order for that you need a couple of things:

• A clear idea what your company is about
• A clear idea what kind of product or service you’re selling
• A general idea about the market and your audience

Let’s say you live in the UK and just started a fitness blog. Now, if you know anything about the Healthiness & Fitness branche, it should be clear that this niche has a lot of competition. So, knowing where you can stand out is not exactly a luxury, but absolutely vital.

Let’s dig in and analyze your blog, the competition and the market in general.

For that we start by giving ChatGPT as much info on your blog and which audience  you’re targeting.

We do that by giving ChatGPT the following prompt:

I just started a fitness blog in the UK. I myself am a 45 male who started doing fitness 10 years ago. I went from absolute beginner to almost professional level. I want to write about general fitness tips, tips for beginners, diet tips and fitness tips for people in their 40’s. I want to accompany my blog with video’s, both embedded on the website and on Youtube.

 As you can see ChatGPT will automatically generate a couple of tips and a general strategy. But in the coming conversation we want to know as much about the market and the competition as possible.

So the next step is getting a general overview of the competition, specifically in Britain. 

A general overview of your Competitors

Ok, the next step is getting a general feel of the Fitness Market in Britain. So I will give it the following prompt:

Can you generate an analysis of the competitive landscape for my Fitness blog specifically to UK Fitness Blogs to develop our positioning and content strategy?

Now ChatGPT will give you a general overview of some of your competitors and accompanying strategies you can use.

A More Detailed overview in Table Format

The third step is getting a more detailed overview. Preferably in a table format, so you can see every bit of information at a glance. For that we use the following prompt:

Could you make a list of competitors for my fitness blog? List the name of the company, the location, size of company, target audience, estimated monthly organic traffic, direct or indirect competitors and estimated monthly paid search ad spend. Please compile results in a table format.

Now, you do have to realize that the most used version of ChatGPT, GPT-3.5 uses information that is from before september 2021, so not all data may be correct or current. However, you can still use this at least for research purposes and to get ideas for your content strategy.

Difference between your product/service and your competitors

Of course you want to know how your product or service is doing compared to the competition. We need to use another example for this, since the Fitness Blog example is more suited for when you’re starting, but you don’t actually have an audience yet.

For that I will use a webshop in the Netherlands for lovers of craft beers, started by a former colleague of mine. This webshop is called Beerdome.nl. I already gave ChatGPT some information on this website, so we can begin immediately. 

We offer the following prompt:

[beerdome.nl] What are the some differences between of our webshop to our competitors? can you offer the information in table format

Customer Experience

Ok, we’ve got a sense about the market, who our competitors are, their strengths and weaknesses compared to our company. Or we know how to use ChatGPT to give us the strategies to research this as speedily as possible.

Now we want to know what our customers think. So we type in:

How do our customers experience our webshop, compared to the competition?

 And get these results

Visitors Experience

If you operate a blog, podcast or Youtube Channel, you don’t have customers per se, but visitors, or traffic. So we want to know them as well. 

For that we go back to the fitness blog and ask ChatGPT the following:

Can you give a description of what kind of audience I should expect to my blog? And add how visitors to my competition are experiencing these websites.

And you will get an outline of what to insert in your blog and a general overview of what kind of content you need to create.

Conclusion

With these tips you should have a pretty good idea of your competition and how your company stands at the moment in comparison. 

And next to that, have a clearer picture about your audience, their needs and focus.

Now there is a big caveat when using ChatGPT for this: as I’ve said here earlier and in another blog, the information in this AI tool isn’t always up to date. So use it as a tool to help you get your marketing research on a higher level. But not as your primary source of information on your market.

For that I advice you to use Keyword Research tools, like KeySearch, which offer the option to do conduct research on your competition as well. 

Or use an alternative AI Tool, such as Google’s Bard tool, on which I will write a similar article quite soon!