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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The Need for Diverse Perspectives in Product Development (with Candice Poon, Program Manager @ Microsoft)
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From Management Consultant to Product Manager (with Deepti Tadala, Technical Product Manager @ Synacor)
Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (with Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development" & Director Customer Research @ GitHub)
Lifelong Learning for Product Managers (with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO @ Product School)
Product Management Lessons from a PM Turned Teacher Turned PM (with Melanie McKay, Head of Consumer Product @ Rightmove)
Data-driven Product Delivery & Story Points on Everything (with James Rooney, Delivery Manager @ Discovery Inc.)
How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (with Marty Cagan, author of Inspired & Empowered)
Scaling your Product Team with Product Operations (with Christine Itwaru, Senior Director of Product Operations @ Pendo)
How to Crack your Product Management Career (with Jackie Bavaro, co-author of Cracking the PM Interview & Cracking the PM Career)
Redefining Product-Led Growth (with Heather James, Founder @ Product-Led Alliance)
Product Management in Lockdown & the Perils of Hustle Culture (with Jack Stevens, Senior PM @ Publicis Sapient)
Product Marketing & the Importance of Pirate Metrics (with Abby Hehemann, Senior Product Marketing Manager @ GetResponse)
Empathy, Mentorship and the Importance of Diversity & Inclusion (with Ana Kresina, PM @ Redbubble)
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