If you research competitors, you need to understand where publishers discuss them and what earns them a place in the coverage. Competitor Mentions finds pages discussing the competitors you named in your campaign. Read those pages as a list of publications that cover your market and are willing to name a vendor.
Find the publications, not the news
Watching a competitor for its own sake produces anxiety and no work. Watching the pages that mention them produces a prospect list.
A publication that named a competitor has told you it covers your subject, that it names vendors at all, and that somebody there is writing about this now. Most prospect research never gets that far.
So read the report as a list of places. Not a list of events.
What each result type is worth
| What you find | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| A roundup naming several competitors and not you | The best row you will get. Right audience, and the format already includes vendors. |
| A single competitor covered in depth | Somebody pitched and it landed. Work out what made it worth writing about. |
| A comparison between two competitors | What your buyers read while deciding. Your absence is a positioning problem. |
| A customer story about a competitor | Tells you which use case they are winning and the words they win it with. |
| A competitor mentioned in passing | Little on its own. Note the publication if it keeps coming up. |
Row one is where the value is. Work it every week, not when you happen to notice it.
Setting the competitor list properly
Competitors live on the campaign. Name them once and they apply across the mention reports, the link gap analysis and your tracked prompts.
Pick the companies your buyers actually weigh against you. Not the biggest names in the category. Compare yourself to firms your buyers have never heard of and you get a report about a market you do not sell into.
Labels get applied when a report is drawn, not when the data was collected. Add a competitor you overlooked and your existing history immediately shows where they have been appearing, with no new collection.
Working a roundup you are absent from
The most common productive row, and the order matters.
- Read what the piece is for. A buyer's guide, a category overview, one person's opinion post and a sponsored listing all need different approaches, and one of them is not worth your time.
- Check whether anyone maintains it. Updated this year, live opportunity. From 2021 with a departed author, no.
- Find the inclusion criteria. Sometimes written down, sometimes obvious from what the listed companies have in common. If all three are enterprise products and you sell to small teams, your absence is correct.
- Look for the mechanism. A suggestion form, a submissions page, an author who invites additions.
- Make a specific case. What you do that the listed products do not, and for which reader. Being asked to add you because you also exist gets deleted.
Where the piece is maintained and there is no mechanism, your route is usually to become worth adding. Not to ask.
What not to do with this report
Do not respond publicly to competitor coverage as a matter of routine. A competitor's good week is not yours to fix, and being seen to react is worse than ignoring it.
Do not read mention volume as sales. A competitor with a press function gets written about more without winning any of the deals you lose.
Do not assume a mention is favorable. The report tells you a name appeared. It does not tell you how.
Making it a habit
Weekly: scan for roundups and comparisons, skip everything else, add what qualifies to your placement list. Do not act on the day.
Quarterly: look at which publications keep coming up. One that names your competitors over and over and never names you is a single relationship gap, not a run of missed articles, and it should be handled as one.
When planning publication research, use competitor mentions to identify relevant coverage. Read the source before deciding whether your business has a useful reason to approach that publisher.
See competitor monitoring, studying competitor placements, or competitor monitoring tools.