Maximizing Competitor Research with Claude: A Marketing Guide

TL;DR

This article explores Claude AI's capabilities as an advanced chatbot for natural language tasks, focusing on its application in competitor analysis. It details how to use Claude for market research, website comparisons, and strategy development, offering practical prompt examples and highlighting its strengths against alternatives like ChatGPT.

Claude AI Overview

Claude is an AI chatbot assistant developed by Anthropic, designed for natural language conversations and tasks like content summarization, writing, and data analysis. It can answer questions in a natural, conversational manner and handle tasks like brainstorming, content summarization, writing code and text, market research, and data analysis.
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Claude AI is praised for its ethical standards and scored higher benchmark ratings compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT’s GPT3.5. It can understand longer pieces of text (up to 150 pages) than GPT 3.5. Claude tends to be more conversational than ChatGPT and can handle more complex tasks.

Use Cases

Claude has various applications across industries, businesses, and user types:

Create a sales pitch
Write an app
Practice interview questions
Plan a vacation
Review a contract
Break down complex ideas
Analyze code
Preview code
Debug issues
Create reports
Search the web
Create visualizations
Analyze data
Brainstorm ideas
Refine concepts

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Claude vs. ChatGPT

ChatGPT-4 (paid tier) still beats Claude’s paid version. Claude lacks the following abilities that ChatGPT has:

Image creation and understanding
Video creation
ChatGPT’s code interpreter feature
Editing documents in the conversation
Advanced voice mode

However, for writing, brainstorming, and as a creative tool, Claude is the better AI assistant. It tends to be more conversational than ChatGPT and can handle more complex tasks.

Using Claude for Competitor Analysis

First Approach

Start by asking Claude AI: Can you help me do competitor research? Then provide the following details:

What industry or market are you in?
Are you looking to research competitors for an existing business or a new venture you're planning?
Do you have specific competitors in mind, or are you trying to identify who your competitors are?
What's your main goal - pricing analysis, feature comparison, market positioning, or something else?

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Claude can identify competitors and outline key insights on their marketing strategy. It can also show the industry’s market trends and recommend competitor analysis frameworks. Claude can also do a deep dive on specific competitors, such as Casper and Purple.

Claude can also produce a head-to-head comparison of brands’ content strategy, influencer approach, brand positioning, and advertising focus.

claude head to head comparison of casper and purple mattress
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Claude can help develop strategies based on competitor approaches and create a content calendar detailing creative briefs, CTAs, platforms, and goals for each post.

claude marketing strategy framework for mattress business
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Website Comparison

You can ask Claude to do a deep analysis and comparison of your website and your competitors’ websites. Use the following prompt:

claude website comparison
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For each website, Claude can identify a primary focus, key elements, and strengths and weaknesses, and create recommendations for homepage optimization. It can also create layout recommendations for a new homepage, complete with copy and social proof ideas.

claude homepage conversion analysis casper vs purple vs leesa
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Second Approach

In this approach, you gather competitor data by yourself. Conduct preliminary research on your competitors and compile information such as:

Blog post titles and descriptions
Ad copy
Top-performing social media posts’ captions
Email subject lines and preview texts
Engagement metrics (likes, shares, etc.)

Do the same for your business. Save the file and upload it to a conversation with Claude. Then, ask: What patterns and techniques do each my competitors use to boost engagement and conversions? Compare our marketing strategies and analyze what makes their marketing effective. Claude will then churn out a detailed analysis of your competitors based on the document’s information.

Cultural Adoption of AI

Anthropic unveiled its first-ever Claude campaign (created by Mother), quickly followed by OpenAI’s first dedicated ChatGPT campaign, made with Isle of Any.

Anthropic is actively showing its awareness of the limitations of AI, positioning Claude as helping expand humanity’s thinking and creativity, “not outsource or replace it".