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.
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!
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 othersIt 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 competitorsThere 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 rationalBe 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 BethanYou 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.
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Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (with Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)
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Product Managing APIs - What’s Different and What’s the Same? (with Deepa Goyal, Product Strategy Lead @ Postman & Author of ”API Analytics for Product Managers”)
Build Better Products Faster by Embracing Continuous Delivery (with Dave Farley, Consultant & Co-author of ”Continuous Delivery”)
The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (with Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (with Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)
Doing the Splits to Accelerate your Product Growth (with Andres Glusman, CEO @ DoWhatWorks & A/B Test Enthusiast)
Moving to Customer-Led Growth by Forgetting the Funnel (with Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop, Founders @ Forget the Funnel)
Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (with Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (with Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author ”Product Operations Manifesto”)
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(Don’t) Scream If You Want To Go Faster - How to Accelerate Product Development (with Ed Biden, Founder @ Hustle Badger)
The Rise of the Robots - How to Responsibly use AI in your Products (with ChatGPT 4, Cutting-edge language model @ OpenAI)
Moving from Value Streams to Software Profit Streams (with Luke Hohmann, Co-author ”Software Profit Streams” & former SAFe® Framework Contributor)
The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (with Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author ”Productize”)
How to Move Fast Without Breaking Things (with Dani Grant, Co-founder & CEO @ Jam)
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