Competitive Analysis

Want an example of performing competitive analysis in minutes? Easy. Type in a topic, and the AI Assistants will give you insights into each competitor’s feature set. Some content may need to be updated (information about certain products is a couple of years old, so I’ll move over to Perplexity for a more current answer), but it can highlight emerging industry trends and potentially overlooked features others may have missed.

This summarization is not the final product. It’s a starting point for initial alignment and can be iterated for refinement. It sometimes misses smaller players that may be a threat, but it at least gets you started.

As long as there’s enough content for the category, it can return the answer to get you started as a baseline for your competitive analysis.

Start with the Domain

Begin by declaring the category you want to research or the areas you want to compare across competitors. I will start with this prompt to get a generalized list of competitors for the category. We’ll use our continuing theme of customer relationship management as the category.

For this example, I want ten systems with five items each.

Prompt

Create a competitive investigation table of 10 customer relationship management systems, with at least five items for each category.

Add a Framework

The initial answer was pretty good, but I might want to add more structure. The framework I’ll use is a SWOT analysis for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s one of my favorites for reviewing competitors.

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to identify and analyze the internal and external factors that can affect a business or project’s success. It helps organizations understand their competitive position and develop strategic plans to achieve their goals.

You can use other frameworks (use a prompt of “What are alternatives to SWOT?” for fun). Here’s a list:

SOAR Analysis: SOAR focuses on positive aspects and is used for strategic planning by emphasizing the organization’s strengths and vision for the future.
BCG Matrix: Developed by the Boston Consulting Group, this helps organizations analyze their product lines or business units.
Ansoff Matrix: This helps organizations determine growth strategies.

Prompt

Create a competitive investigation table of 10 customer relationship management systems, categorized by SWOT, with at least five items for each category.

Include Your Company

Engage with the AI Assistant to iteratively refine the analysis or ask follow-up questions. This interactive process saves time and enhances the depth and precision of your competitive analysis, making it a potent tool for strategic decision-making.

You can do this by rewriting your prompt to include any information you want by comparing your product with others. An even better approach is to include your company in the analysis (sometimes it won’t show up in the initial answer) to get a sense of where your organization sits in the analysis.

Let’s say I work for HubSpot and want to see how we fair against our competitors.

Prompt

Create a competitive analysis table of 10 customer relationship management systems, including HubSpot, categorized by SWOT with at least five items for each category.

Add Target Market

Now, request deeper dives into specific areas. We will add small businesses in the prompt so there is more detail to influence the conversation. Most of the time, it’ll return a few results not listed in the previous prompt, and that’s good.

It widens the universe of results you can use in your research, showing possibilities you can explore further.

Prompt

Create a competitive analysis table of 10 customer relationship management systems for mid-sized businesses, including HubSpot, categorized by SWOT with at least five items for each category.

GPT Prompt Guides