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.
Navigating the World of Product Management (with George Nurijanian, Product Owner @ Xero & Founder @ prodmgmt.world)
Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (with Rich Mironov, Product Consultant & author ”The Art of Product Management”)
Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (with Jas Shah, Product Consultant & Founder @ Bitsul)
Curing Product Diseases with a Radical Product Vision (with Radhika Dutt, author ”Radical Product Thinking”)
Driving Organisational Alignment with Survival Metrics (with Adam Thomas, founder @ Approaching One)
Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (with Giff Constable, former CPO @ Meetup & author ”Talking to Humans”)
Solve Customer Problems Quickly by Joining the No-Code Revolution (with Natalie Furness, founder @ Minimum Viable Stack)
How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (with Michele Hansen, author ”Deploy Empathy”)
Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (with Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
Finding a PM Superpower and Using your Product Sense (with Peter Knudson & Braxton Bragg, co-authors "Product Sense")
Escaping VC Culture & Building Products that Focus on True Lifetime Value (with Rand Fishkin, author "Lost & Founder" & co-founder @ SparkToro)
Taking Data Science from Academia to the Heart of your Product (with Paul Meinshausen, co-founder @ Aampe)
All Aboard! Why You Need To Get Product Onboarding Right (with Ramli John, MD @ ProductLed)
Challenges & Opportunities for Africans Making Products for Africans (with Abisoye Falabi, Senior PM @ TradeDepot)
Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (with Teresa Torres, author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
Platform Product Management & Getting Ready for Launch Day (with John Zilch, Director of PM @ Upland & founder @ Launch Day)
Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (with Hubert Palan, founder & CEO @ Productboard)
Applying Agile Principles to Education & Measuring Learning (with Chris Hull, founder & CPO @ Otus)
Data-Driven Product Development & Ethics in AI (with Korbinian Spann, founder & MD @ Insaas)
Avoiding Bulls**t Product Advice & Focusing on the Essential (with Henry Latham, founder @ Prod MBA)
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