--- title: "The Market Analysis Competitors Never Do" url: "https://marketermagazine.co/insight/the-market-analysis-competitors-never-do/" author: "Lilach Bullock" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # The Market Analysis Competitors Never Do ### **Copying a competitor's channel** When a client tells me they need to be where a rival is, I ask what that rival's presence is converting to. Most times nobody has checked. Budgets get moved because someone in a meeting saw a competitor's ad and panicked, not because there was data behind the move. Real market analysis means working out why a competitor shows up somewhere, what it costs them, and whether it is working for them. Those three things almost never get checked before the budget gets reallocated. ### **TikTok spend results** A B2B SaaS client I worked with had put 30 percent of their marketing budget into TikTok because a competitor was there. Nobody had asked whether their buyers were on TikTok, or whether the competitor's own presence was producing anything. The spend ran for months. Zero conversions came back. The problem was spend allocation, not the channel. The fix was pulling the budget and putting it where the buying signals pointed, which had nothing to do with what the competitor happened to be doing that quarter. ### **Reading negative reviews** For a B2B software client, I spent three weeks reading nothing but negative reviews of the market leader in their category. One and two star reviews specifically, not the three star ones that tend to be noise. That is where people write down exactly what made them angry enough to leave a public record of it. Six complaints came up again and again. Specific and repeated ones, the kind a support team hears every week internally but marketing never sees, because nobody is reading the reviews of the company they are trying to beat. ### **Rebuilding messaging** Once we had the six, we mapped each one against the market leader's own marketing and found their messaging addressed none of them. They were selling features. The complaints were about things like onboarding taking too long and support going quiet after the contract was signed. We rebuilt the client's messaging and support pages around those six pain points. Trial to paid conversion rose 23 percent within four months. Nothing about the product changed in that window. What changed was that the marketing finally spoke to what buyers were frustrated about, rather than what the category usually talks about. ### **Reviewing 18 months of deals** Another client, an 80 employee B2B SaaS company, had pipeline down 40 percent year on year. Their instinct was to add a channel or throw more outbound volume at the problem. Their AI SDR tool was sending more messages than ever and still missing target. Before touching a channel I went back through 18 months of their closed deals with an LLM, looking for what the accounts that bought had in common. The signal that mattered was a specific mix of recent hiring activity and tool stack data, not the job titles or headcount they had been targeting, and it showed up over and over in the deals that closed and was almost absent from the ones that did not. ### **Cutting outreach volume** We rebuilt the target list around those signals, cut outreach volume by 70 percent, and added a pre call brief before every conversation. Reply rate on cold outbound went from 1.1 percent to 9.4 percent. Calls booked per month rose 60 percent with far fewer messages sent. Average deal size went up 35 percent and the sales cycle shortened by three weeks. By the end of the eight weeks they cancelled the AI SDR platform they had been running, saving about 4,000 dollars a month against under 600 dollars in AI tooling costs. The list rebuild did that, not a new channel. My own rule before I move a client's budget is plain. If I cannot measure what a channel is producing, for them or for the competitor they are chasing, I do not move spend into it on instinct. That number comes from closed deals and reviews, not from a screenshot of where someone else happens to be posting. --- [Lilach Bullock](https://www.lilachbullock.com) is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.