Once you’ve got your product narrative in place, you now want to begin researching and developing it.

As mentioned, a good place to start is by doing a competitor analysis. 

Doing a competitor analysis is useful as it not only helps you pick apart your competitor's product narrative, which will then help you develop yours.


But it will also give you an idea of how to brand and price your product, as well as help you generate content marketing ideas too.

The first step is to identify who your top competitors are by doing an online search.

You can think about splitting your competitors into two categories. The first category is direct competitors. These are individuals or companies who offer pretty much the exact same product as you do.

The second category is indirect competitors. These are individuals or companies who have a similar product or service to you.

The difference between direct and indirect competitors is that with indirect competitors there is room that you can develop an affiliate partnership with them, but this won’t be the case for direct competitors.

When selecting the top competitors that you want to analyse, you can do so by picking them based on a mixture of both feeling and logic. In other words, which competitors are you personally inspired by, as well as those competitors who have the largest social media following and engagement.

We’ll be discussing how you can go about the process of searching for your top competitors in more detail in the next lesson.

Once you have short-listed top competitors that you want to analyse into Exercise File 7, the second step is to then spend some time researching their product and how this can help you develop your product narrative.

You can then also spend some time researching their marketing, making notes on their branding, how much they charge for their product, and what keywords and hot topics they focus on.

Finally, you can also then analyse their unique competitive advantage and which competitive advantages on your list tend to repeat over and over again, and then what do you not see on the list?

This final step is going to help signpost you to how to position yourself as a unique brand within your competitive space.

Overall this exercise is not only going to help you develop your product narrative, but also how you can position yourself against your competitors, and then add value to your audience where they’re not currently getting.

You can save your top competitors into Exercise File 7 as and when you stumble across them.

What you’ll likely to find is that as your industry research grows (as we’ll be discussing in the next lesson) so will your awareness of who your top competitors are.