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[00:00:00] James Marland: Hello, and welcome to the Scaling Therapy Practice. This is the show where we empower mission driven leaders and helpers. to launch life changing online courses without complicated programs or funnels. Today we're going to be talking about the topic learning from your competitors using Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
[00:00:31] James Marland: it's going to be a fun and easy way to get to know your market better.
[00:00:34] James Marland: Learning from your competitors can be a fun way to uncover things about your market, what's working well for them, and things that you can add that they do not add.
[00:00:44] James Marland: So today's going to be a fun show. Before we begin the show, I want to let you know about an offer that we have about helping you take control of your story so you can transform your life. It's a mindset course designed to help people overcome self doubt and embrace Limitless possibilities. I have struggled with imposter syndrome and a negative mindset for many years, even though I've had much success in education, my job, my relationships, I still have nagging beliefs that Hold me back and keep me chained to my comfort zone.
[00:01:23] James Marland: So I have put together some of the resources that I have used over the years to help me change my thoughts and reach my dreams. And so I put that in a course and the course is going to help you achieve a compelling vision for your future and give you actionable steps to achieve your dreams. It's going to help you understand what is imposter syndrome and how to overcome it.
[00:01:48] James Marland: And also to let you know, you're not the only one. You're not the only one who feels these things. You're not the only one when you're in a meeting and you're like, I hope I, they don't call me out as a fraud. Or you go to a conference and you're like, I'm the only one here that's struggling with these issues.
[00:02:04] James Marland: Um, imposter syndrome is pretty common and that mindset is there. You're going to learn to shift from a fixed mindset or a victim mindset to a growth mindset where you can embrace challenges and go stronger through real life examples and visualization practices. I really hope that, uh, people who are struggling with, uh, mindset issues and imposter syndrome and believing that they're not good enough, strong enough, or well known enough to launch a course would take a look at the course and see what, uh, what, how it could help them.
[00:02:41] James Marland: This course is only going to be offered until July 31st, and right now there's a 30 percent off coupon when you enter the code email special. And the coupon that's email special, you can view the, uh, you can view the course at courses. coursecreationstudio. com forward slash store. That's course that course creation studio.
[00:03:05] James Marland: com forward slash score. And I do hope you take advantage of the course. It, the, the things have really helped me break out of my comfort zone and. I know sometimes that's, that's all you need, a little bit of encouragement to, to take a step forward. So take that course today. We're going to be explaining why it's important to know your competitors.
[00:03:25] James Marland: Then we're going to dive into using red of readily available tools, such as Google, YouTube, and Amazon to gather all the information you need. So let's jump right in.
[00:03:38] James Marland: So the first thing we're going to be talking about is understanding why you should know your competitors. What is a competitor? You know, what is, who are your competitors? Well, competitors are other businesses that sell the same thing or do something similar to you. And knowing what they do helps you understand what you're up against and how you can do better.
[00:04:02] James Marland: This also helps you understand what they're spending their money in. What are some of their efforts? What are some of the problems they're trying to solve? What are some of their solutions? What are their terms? What are they doing? Because if somebody is already spending money on a market, or spending money trying to reach somebody in your area, then, then that's one clue that your product, your service, your course has a problem.
[00:04:29] James Marland: Reach like people are trying to do it. So if you see competitors, don't be afraid. Just know that they, they are doing things to try to reach the customers that you want to reach. And if there's people doing that, that's a good sign. There's importance of knowing who your competitors are. Because you can identify their market needs by seeing what your competitor offers.
[00:04:53] James Marland: You can find out what customers really want, and maybe there's something missing that you can provide. If you're doing this market research and you do some analysis and you realize they're missing something, that's an advantage you can add to your offer. And that helps you improve your offer. Knowing your competitor helps you make.
[00:05:16] James Marland: It helps you make your products and service better if they have ideas. If you see their products, but you see what's missing, you can just improve what you have so how do you use Google to find competitors? Well, it's as simple as performing a keyword search. A keyword, what's a keyword? Keywords are the words people use to search up things. So if you're looking for ice cream, people would search ice cream. Often one of the things when I'm, what I'm doing, if I'm in an area, I'll go to Google or Google Maps and I will say ice cream near me or plumber near me or restaurant near me and you can use that to your advantage.
[00:06:01] James Marland: If people are looking for your course or your topic, what other words that they are going to type into search. So you start by searching for keywords related to your business. For example, if you sell soap or you're teaching people how to make soap, you'd search for best handmade soap, natural soap for sensitive skin, or um, you know, soap using this soap.
[00:06:26] James Marland: or soap for this problem. Once you find those keywords, uh, they will help you identify what people are searching for. And often the, the top, the top results are ads and you can look at what people are paying for, for the keywords. The top results are usually the most popular results. They're usually the results that have the most likes links.
[00:06:56] James Marland: Google has a way to rank them. And so they rank them to the top. Those are the best performing keywords.
[00:07:03] James Marland: And as I said, pay close attention to the ads. They're often at the very top because somebody's paid for that word or they're paid for that search result. And it should have, I believe it has like just a little word at the end that says ad or maybe it's at the beginning, but it just analyzes it as ad.
[00:07:22] James Marland: You can also do a local search. If you're doing something local, you're teaching something local or doing a course local or offering a search local, just search for local businesses using Google My Business. This helps you find competitors in your area.
[00:07:37] James Marland: So Google's a very important place to find your competitors and using the keywords, the keywords that you want to use, you can just find three to five of them very, very easily. You can also use YouTube in much the same way. Go to YouTube and type in the keywords, handmade soap tutorial, natural soap reviews, and you can identify the popular channels.
[00:08:03] James Marland: Look for the channels that have a lot of subscribers and views. These are the top people that are, that are your competitors. They are doing well in that market. So you'd want to look at what they are doing now. A subscriber to that channel is how many people follow that channel. And the more people that subscribe, the more popular the channel is.
[00:08:28] James Marland: So you will look at their content and watch a few of their videos to see what they're looking about and talking about. Choose some of the popular ones. Why do you think that video connected with people? What did it do? How was it laid out? What was the headline? What are the tags? Videos and other things in search engines are, uh, or social media are tags.
[00:08:55] James Marland: So what are the tags or phrases that describe the video that help people find them? You can write those down. Those are like keywords. Another thing you can do when you were looking for competitors and what they're doing well on their videos is looking for engagement. What do people say about the video?
[00:09:16] James Marland: What do they like? What don't they like? Are they happy? Do they have suggestions? All of these things give you ideas about what people like or don't like, and they are helping you understand how they, the market, the customers are viewing this product.
[00:09:34] James Marland: One of my favorite things to do is use Amazon to find competitors. I love using the book search. I'm in the course creation market. So books are like many courses on topics. So I like to go into Amazon and search for keywords or books on my topic. And I find the ones that are the most popular, two to three of those books.
[00:09:59] James Marland: And then what I do is I, go into the, the ratings and reviews, and I narrow the search by people who have rated it two, three, or four out of five. I ignore, for the most part, the ones and the fives. Ones often just say great things that they loved about the book, or or the course. And fives can be people who are overly negative.
[00:10:25] James Marland: There's, there's often not much value for the researcher in the ones in fives. Although I, to be honest, I do read them as well. But what I definitely do and look for and put a lot of value in are the people who rate the books two, three, and four, or the product two, three, and four, because they're going to tell you something about it that they liked, and maybe something that is missing.
[00:10:51] James Marland: And that is something that you can write down as somebody who's doing research on your competitors to understand the problem that they are solving and the. Promise that they are delivering on, and it also can help you find and identify areas where the product is missing the mark a little bit. And that is where you can swoop in.
[00:11:13] James Marland: If you can identify or find a pattern of things in the products that people are offering that you can do better, or you have a special way, or you can do it easier or a shortcut for people, then that is something that you would offer in your marketing. That is something that you would highlight.
[00:11:31] James Marland: So go through the reviews, find out what people love, find out what they don't, that they don't like. The other thing you can do in the books is Go into the table of contents often on Google or Amazon, especially there's a look inside the book tab. So click that and look at the table of contents, write down the chapters.
[00:11:51] James Marland: How are they describing them? What are the problems the chapters are solving? How is it laid out? Can you glean any information about what they are doing? Because a published book has had real money spent on it with a real author, a real publicist, a real marketing person. who has helped them design their product to sell the most.
[00:12:14] James Marland: So you can learn from how books are outlined. So how you can outline your own, what is there, what did they find? What are the terms they used and how they organize the book? It can be very telling to help you organize your course. If you're doing a course on these types of things on how somebody else who has had a reviewer, an editor, look at it, see if you can gain something from that.
[00:12:43] James Marland: One of the easiest ways to analyze this data is to put it into a spreadsheet and you put down, there's, there's lots of things you can do for market research. But the simplest way is just to write down the name of the company, the website. The product that you're comparing or the book or the YouTube channel, the price range, the promotion that they're using.
[00:13:10] James Marland: In your research, you're going to identify the promise that they are promising my product will do this. You're going to identify the problem that they are trying to solve. And then any unique features. And then you can also put down for the customer reviews. What, what is missing? Like what, what is missing that, that people are looking for?
[00:13:34] James Marland: So you just fill out a little spreadsheet. You, uh, it does take time. Not as much time as individual interviews, but it does take time. Fill these out and you analyze it and you look for patterns. You look for things you can offer. What is the problem that they are solving for what price? And you're, you're often going to find out.
[00:13:57] James Marland: You know, what are the different price ranges and not every product is going to be the same. If you have five products to solve the problem of handmade soap, there's, there's going to be a range of problems because somebody is going to use different materials or a different process or a different way of doing things.
[00:14:16] James Marland: And it's going to be less or more expensive. Somebody is going to offer a community which increases the price or somebody is going to offer. Individual coaching or somebody is just going to say, here's two videos in a worksheet. And with no other support. And that might be a little cheaper than the other ones.
[00:14:35] James Marland: So you're going to notice some patterns and you're going to figure out what people are offering the product for what the problem they're solving. What is the. Promise that they're delivering on and what might be missing that you can add to the market for your unique offering. And then you just get down to, to tailoring your target audience.
[00:14:59] James Marland: What, what are things that they're looking for and how you can solve it? This helps you validate your idea. I think the best way to validate your idea is customer contact, like talking to real people and writing down their, their, um, their thoughts, feelings, fears, empathize with them, understanding the problem they're trying to solve.
[00:15:23] James Marland: So how do you use this information to help you craft your proposal? So one, you, it helps you align your offer with the market needs. You use what you learned about customers to shape your proposal. If people want natural ingredients for their soap, then that's what you highlight in your pitch. Another thing is you can differentiate from your competitors.
[00:15:50] James Marland: You can show your product is better. Maybe your soap lasts longer. Maybe your soap has unique senses, scents. I like soaps that are, have a little bit of scrubby things in them. So maybe that's what you've identified. Oh, my, my people are tactile. And they want little scrubby things in their soap.
[00:16:10] James Marland: So you, you. You have reviewed your market research and that's what you found that people are like, I wish my, the soap had some sort of tactile on this to it and you tailor your offer to your target target audience. Make sure your proposal speaks directly to your audience. If your main customers are. If you're eco conscious, then focus on your soap is environmentally friendly and how that it doesn't impact the environment.
[00:16:42] James Marland: If the soap is, if your customers, um, are mechanics, you know, mechanics who want hand soap and they don't want things harsh on their skin, then how could you highlight what your, your audience needs? I remember a soap, I think it was called goop that, um, when I was working on my cars with my dad, um, We used it and it really cleaned things off.
[00:17:08] James Marland: And then there was another one that had, um, pumice in it. And I can't remember that was, but I do remember those soaps. And so maybe your soaps are designed for, you know, the outdoor person. So, what does an outdoor person want? What does a mechanic want? What does a mother want? You know, what, what do they want?
[00:17:26] James Marland: And highlight that. So putting it all together, if you've never made a value statement or a promise, I have a simple formula for you. So a simple way to state your proposal or your value proposition is I help target audience with my solution or benefit without this pain or obstacle so they can receive the desired outcome. I'll put that formula in the show notes. But the breakdown is your target audience is the specific group of people that you are helping.
[00:18:05] James Marland: The solution or benefit is your primary advantage or service that you provide. The pain point or obstacle is the common problem that you've identified or the barrier, barrier that your audience has and the desired outcome. The positive result that, that they achieve from your help. So it's I help target audience with their solution or benefit.
[00:18:29] James Marland: without pain or obstacles, so they can receive the desired outcome. And I think a fun exercise might be, could you write that for your competitors at the end of the spreadsheet? And I'll give you a spreadsheet in the show notes that highlights some of the things that you could be asking. At the end, could you write out their value proposition?
[00:18:51] James Marland: A good web page might, will probably have the value proposition already in there. Written out there. It might even be in their headline on their first page on their web page. If you can identify that. So what is Your proposition? What is your value proposition? Who are you helping? What do you help them with?
[00:19:10] James Marland: How are you gonna help them? How do you make their life better when you do this market research, you're going to have a much better way of connecting with your core audience. This isn't the only research you're going to have to do. But if you do this research, you're going to be much further ahead of your competitors because most people don't put in the hard work of learning about their competitors or their clients. They just make things and hope they sell. Thanks for joining me today.
[00:19:39] James Marland: This is James Marland, the host of Scaling Therapy Practice. If you have enjoyed this episode, if you've learned something, if you found something of value, please share this show with other people, help us get discovered. Also rate and review, those are also great. Wonderful ways of getting the word out that there is support and help for people who have a mission, who have something on their heart and they want to get it out there, but they need a little bit of support and encouragement to get that, get their course out there.
[00:20:11] James Marland: Thanks for joining me. We will see you next week.
