Competitive intelligence gathering is also a core function of a product marketer. The software space is rapidly expanding and often saturated. For this blog post, I will share my competitive intel journey and what I learned along the way.

Introduction

Again, my journey with competitive intel gathering started at CoStar. Here we launched our Lease Accounting product. While our messaging initially shared how our product was easy to use and proven. We wanted to test how much that resonated with our target audience. One was to do this was through competitor research.

As a result, I had the opportunity to keep track of our nine largest competitors. Google searches and alerts helped me initially identify them and keep up press releases and announcements.

Their website content helped me identify their messaging. From that content I was able to see that some of them also focused on being proven. The website content even helped me identify their partners, which gave us ideas of future partnerships as well.

The last tool I used was Google’s Keyword Planner, which helped me see which keywords our competitors were effectively using.

All these lessons helped with my competitor strategy over the years and especially when I landed my first official PMM role.