How to Spy on Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategy

"How to spy on your competitors’ marketing strategy" is a popular question on Google and it cracks me up. People talk like they're about to crawl through air ducts with night-vision goggles. Like there's some secret playbook hidden in a vault somewhere, and if you could just crack the code, you'd unlock unlimited growth. Like they’re Plankton and they’re about to finally get their hands on the Krabby Patty formula.

But here's what you're actually doing, Mr. Bond: market research. Boring, necessary, unglamorous market research.

And if you're not doing it, you're flying blind—which means you're probably annoying the hell out of your prospects with offers they don't want and messages they've already tuned out.

This isn't espionage. It's basic market intelligence.

You're not looking for secrets to steal. You're looking for context that helps you make better decisions about what to test, what to skip, and how to differentiate your products from everyone else.

So let’s talk about how you can do market research well.

The real reasons to study competitors have nothing to do with stealing tactics. In fact, if you do that and you don’t understand the rationale behind them, you’ll end up wasting time and money.

Instead, market research helps you understand what offers already exist in your market so you can find the gaps. You need to know what messages are saturating your audience so you don't add to the noise. You need to validate whether your special sauce, your specific kind of differentiation matters to buyers or if you're just adding adjectives to the same value proposition everyone else is using.

This is partly related to the explore/exploit tradeoff which I’ve talked about before. Basically, that tradeoff is all about how to decide between trying new things and doubling down on your best option. Exploiting is where the money is made, but you’ll never get there if you don’t explore first. Market research speeds up the necessary (and often fun) exploration process because it lets you gather information about the landscape before committing resources. Competitor research can sometimes show you what's worth testing versus what to skip entirely.

But here's what this is NOT: a playbook to copy verbatim.

It's not a shortcut around testing your own offer. And it's definitely not a way to know what's working for them behind the scenes—you can't see their profit and loss statement.

The connection to good marketing is pretty direct. You can't do good matchmaking if you don't understand the market context. Marketing is matchmaking, not manipulation. And matchmaking requires knowing the landscape you're operating in.

One more thing to hammer home: if everyone in your space is doing the same thing, that doesn't mean it works. It might just mean everyone's copying each other. Which happens a lot more than you'd think.

Now that I’ve talked about how market research is important, let’s talk about specific places you can go to “spy” on competitors’ marketing strategies.

But remember: don't obsess over your competitors’ every move. Don't assume high visibility equals success. It’s a mistake to copy tactics without understanding your own context. And you can’t afford to ignore your own customers to chase what competitors are doing.

If you’re running a small or mid-sized business, even a single workday of competitive research every quarter is often plenty. You’d be amazed what you can learn in the span of just 8 hours.

You can see your competitors’ ad creative and landing pages. You can see what channels they're using and investing in. You can see their messaging, their positioning, their price points, and the sorts of topics they talk about often. You can see what shows up in search results and how their website flows from Point A to Point B.

But you can’t see pretty much everything that matters for profitability.

You can't see conversion rates. You can't see customer acquisition cost or customer lifetime value. You can't see whether any specific campaign is making money or bleeding cash. You can't see their internal attribution or what they think is working.

A competitor might be all over Facebook ads, but unless you have literal insider data, you have no idea if they're making money or just burning budget. High impression counts don't mean profitability. That slick website might convert at 0.5%. Those polished, expensive-looking ads might be the ones they're about to turn off because they're not working. And you can land really high-value podcast and newspaper coverage without having a P&L to match.

What this means for you is that you have to treat everything you see as a hypothesis to test, not a strategy to copy.

A lot of businesses—possibly even the majority—couldn’t even tell you which of their own marketing is working. Your competitors aren't sitting on some secret formula. They're probably just as confused as you are.

Raw information is useless until you take the time to interpret it. So here are some rules of thumb for how to think about what you see.

Ask yourself if what you’re seeing is proven, or if people are just copying one another. Over time, you can start to see if companies are investing heavily—running multiple ads, publishing consistent content—or just seeing what happens. When you see a track record of several months or a year or more, that’s a sign (but not a guarantee) that they’re seeing results.

Look for patterns across multiple competitors. If you find multiple competitors emphasize the same pain point, that's validated demand—but you'll need stronger differentiation because you're competing in a crowded space. Consider addressing that pain point in a different way, or targeting it more specifically than they do.

See how they handle price. If they all avoid discussing it, there might be a race to the bottom that they’re trying to avoid. If they all use similar offers like free trials or free consultations, differentiation might matter. If nobody's using a specific channel, maybe it doesn't work—or maybe it's an opportunity.

Consider the problems they're not addressing. Think about the audiences they're not targeting and the channels they're ignoring. These gaps might be opportunities, or there might be a good reason they don't exist. You won't know until you test.

Remember, “spying” means interpreting signals, not reading an instruction manual. Use this process to come up with testable hypotheses, and then test them in your own context with your own customers.

I’ll give you one concrete example here. I work with an order fulfillment center, and we emphasize trust and personal relationships a lot, which is a bit an unusual pitch because “trust” and “personal relationships” are hard to objectively prove. But if you’re a Shopify store owner, having a company handle inventory on your behalf is scary. Thanks in no small part to that fact, we noticed a lot of the competition getting bad reviews from their clients about not being able to reach someone or not knowing what’s going on with their inventory.

So we built our messaging around the exact opposite of that problem. We tested this on landing pages to see how people would respond and whether this addressed a real problem in the eyes of their prospective clients. We had plenty of excellent reviews to share as well, which helped ground the selling proposition in real evidence. And as it turned out, the messaging was very effective, and it’s helped us to win quality leads for a very agreeable price ever since.

Market research can only take you so far. To get the rest of the way, you have to start experimenting.

Perhaps the most immediate benefit of research is that it can help you avoid obvious mistakes. If a competitor clearly tried something and stopped, you can simply not repeat the mistake. If they're making rookie errors—bad landing pages, unclear offers—then you just don't repeat them. If they all have slow websites or terrible mobile experiences, you can win on basics alone.

This connects directly to scope control. This research can help you eliminate what won't work.

But beyond the basics, your research process can help you come up with big-picture ideas worth testing based on observations.

Research will help you come up with ideas on how to differentiate intentionally. If everyone's using the same offer, yours should be different and better. Then from here, you test systematically, starting small and measuring results.

You might find that your competitors’ tactics work for their offer but not yours. This is why you don’t commit big budgets based on what you see competitors doing without testing on a smaller scale first. But likewise, you might discover a brand new idea that works and which no one else has adequately explored. You won’t know until you try.

But the one thing you must avoid is copying others’ funnels step-by-step. Don't ignore your own data in favor of what you see externally. This internal knowledge is more valuable than any external observation.

You want to “spy” on your competitors’ marketing strategy?

As long as you’re not hacking, breaking and entering, or otherwise sneaking in places you shouldn’t be, I say go for it. In fact, I encourage you, because, really, what you’re doing is market research.

You're collecting context, not stealing secrets. And you can do this as you look at their messaging, their offers, and their channels. You can use this information to come up with hypotheses. Then you can test those hypotheses in your own context and learn what works for your business with your customers.

But don't obsess over what the other guy is doing, at least not too much. You can't see their P&L. You can't see their conversion rates. You can't see whether they're actually making money. All you can see is what's visible—and visibility doesn't mean viability.

The real work comes down to a lot more than just watching your competitors. It’s about understanding your market well enough to show up with an offer people want, using messages that don't make them tune you out.

That's not espionage. That's just good marketing.