Just ‘cos your competitor markets that way doesn’t mean it’ll work for you
“So, tell me about your marketing plan”.
"Ah, yeah there's a page in my deck all about how we'll market it".
"...but it doesn’t say how to reach these customers. Instead, it talks about how competitor x has 100,000 subscribers”
“Well, that’s the channel proven, isn’t it?”
I’m lucky to spend time mentoring businesses through accelerators or via workshops, and this is a conversation that has started to come up. A lot.
It’s based on the assumptions that:
You can just turn on a marketing channel like it’s a tap and…
You can replicate the reach a competitor has immediately
Which we know isn’t the case.
People sometimes don’t realise it takes just as long to build your marketing as it does your product.
And, until you have your own mailing list/community, you’ve got to pay to play in someone else’s space. This is a point I am going to reiterate below, don’t worry, it’s not a duplication. It’s just really important!
The problem with basing your marketing plan on what your competitor is doing.
It’s okay to be a bit of a competitor stalker, but remember, you don't know the full story.
You see your competitor's shiny LinkedIn presence or their clever SEO strategy, and you think, "that's our answer."
But you're missing crucial context.
You don't know if they've just had a £500k cash injection to fund that content team.
You may not know that it’s barely ticking over because the channel has become incredibly saturated, and their growth person spends most of their time crying.
A few months back, a client showed me what they’d gathered on their competitor's SEO approach.
"They’re everywhere, they’ve got a first-page listing for all the product terms I want”.
When we dug deeper, we discovered the competitor had been posting for three years, and had a full-time content marketing manager. The demand for some of the keywords wasn’t as high in volume as we’d thought and, when looking at the potential conversion rates, chances are - the numbers wouldn’t have worked.
Not quite the quick win they'd imagined.
I've seen marketing teams spend months trying to replicate a competitor's content strategy, only to discover later that the competitor moved away from it because it wasn't generating revenue.
On the point of competitors, remember who you think is a competitor might not be.
Why we can get this part of marketing wrong at the beginning
You’d be surprised - or not - that many companies fall in love with their product (which is brilliant), but they leave the commercial stuff until the last minute (which isn't).
By the time they start thinking seriously about marketing, they're under pressure to show traction quickly. Whether that’s because they’ve got investors asking where the “virality” is or they are about to run out of runway.
The reality check when it comes to seeing if you can replicate a competitor’s marketing strategy
When it comes to understanding reach and how many people you can get your product in front of, it’s important to consider your audience like this:
Owned media (your email list, your website traffic) - you control it, but it takes time to build
Earned media (pr, word of mouth, organic social) - free but unpredictable
Paid media (ads, sponsored content) - immediate but costly
Most successful marketing strategies combine all three, but the mix depends entirely on your situation.
Until you build your own organic community or email list, you're going to have to pay to play in someone else's space.
How to assess if a marketing channel makes sense
Before you copy that competitor's strategy, ask yourself these four questions:
Targeting: are your ideal customers actually there?
Context: are they in the right mindset to hear about your solution?
Intent: are they actively looking for what you're selling?
Time: how long will it realistically take to see results?
Channels evolve as your product grows
Here's what most founders don't realise: your marketing channels will evolve from unscalable to scalable as demand for your product grows.
Early on, you might be doing things that don't scale, like personally reaching out to prospects or speaking at tiny industry events. As you prove product-market fit, you can invest in more scalable channels.
Your channel choice should be determined by your go-to-market strategy, not by what looks sexy on your competitor's social feed.
Marketing channels change and we’ve got proof
A client of mine reported a drop in website traffic. After digging, we saw that the way people search for their products was changing. SEO for top-of-the-funnel questions was out, and ChatGPT was in.
Wynter also recently found, after surveying 100 marketing leads from big SaaS companies, that the channels driving pipeline were changing.
The results were very interesting. Here are a few:
- “The comeback kid: In-person events. 16% of leaders say it's their most reliable pipeline generator. Small, focused gatherings where people have real conversations.
- The quiet performer: Webinars are converting - but only when you stop talking about yourself. The secret? Feature real customers solving real problems.
- The evolution: Search isn't dead, it's mutating. 20% of teams are already optimising for LLM-based discovery.
- The graveyard: 24% are cutting paid social (except LinkedIn). Facebook and Instagram? "
Summary
Your competitor's marketing success might look effortless from the outside, but you're only seeing the highlight reel, not the behind-the-scenes reality.
Stop being a marketing voyeur. Start with your customers, not your competitors. Understand where they spend time, what they care about, and how they prefer to learn about new solutions.
