Competitive analysis for creators, coaches, and online entrepreneurs is just as important as it is for big businesses. In today's creator economy, it's not enough to just create, you need to find ways to differentiate.
Whether you're building a course, membership site, coaching program, or digital product, chances are your audience has seen similar things before. So, how do you make your offer the number one choice?
That's where competitive analysis comes in.
Performing market research is not about copying others. It's about understanding your niche and space, identifying opportunities, and crafting a unique angle that helps you achieve two things: connect with your audience and set you apart from your competitors.
A strategic look at your competitors can unlock clarity in your creator strategy. Let's dive into how to do market research for creators the right way.
What is competitive analysis?
In short, competitive analysis is the process of evaluating others in your niche to better understand how they serve your target audience, what the gaps are in their offers, and how you can use that to your advantage to serve the audience even better.
For online course creators, coaches, and online entrepreneurs, competitive analysis means:
- Analyzing other coaches, course creators, and influencers in your industry
- Looking at their product or service offerings
- Reviewing their content on various platforms to determine what's working and what's missing
- Finding out their pricing, positioning, and messaging
- Examining their audience's engagement and marketing funnels
Market research for creators is essential. It helps you spot trends, surface content gaps, and refine your own niche analysis in the process. After you conduct the competitive analysis, you're in a much stronger place to create an offer that speaks more clearly to your audience and addresses the pain points they have.
Best tools and templates to use
To perform a basic competitive analysis, you don't need a fancy setup or expensive tools. You can get started with your laptop and a simple Google Sheet. However, using the right tools can make your process smoother and more actionable. Plus, you may be able to perform the market research much quicker.
Here's a list of tools that are worth considering to help make your process more efficient and easier:
- Google Sheets / Notion: Helps you create databases to keep track of all the features, pricing, strengths, and gaps.
- SparkToro: This tool allows you to discover where your audience hangs out online--what podcasts they listen to, what social channels they use most frequently, and what keywords they look for.
- Ubersuggests: Uncover the best SEO keywords and strategy, find out keyword performance, and get traffic breakdowns.
- Teachable's Course Directory: For course creators, utilize the Teachable course discovery to browse real creator offerings in various niches to analyze formats, pricing, and product structures.
- ChatGPT (or Claude): Use AI to help you quickly run analyses, summarize competitor content, identify messaging patterns and performance, and extract content themes and topics that are relevant and effective.
Steps to run a competitive analysis (with and without AI)
So, how do you run an effective competitive analysis campaign? It's actually easier than you think. Here's a structured step-by-step process to guide you through the whole process:
Step 1: Define your niche and goal
The very first step is to clarify your goals and unique angle:
- What's your core offer? A course, a coaching program, or an exclusive membership?
- Who is your target audience?
- What's your business goal? Are you trying to launch, grow, or reposition?
Answering these questions will give you a solid ground to build on. To make this step-by-step process easier to understand, let's use an example.
Let's say you're a certified yoga teacher who wants to launch an online course as a way to diversify income and scale your business. Here's how your answers to the questions above might look:
- Your core offer: An online course on practicing yoga.
- Your target audience: Millennial moms who want to invest in their wellness and health, but have limited time.
- Your business goal: Launch a new offer to expand your business and make it scalable (because in-person yoga classes are not).
Step 2: Identify 3–7 relevant competitors
The next step in the process is to look for creators who serve a similar audience to your target audience and do something similar to what you want to do. That includes:
- Direct competitors: People in the same niche with the same offers.
- Adjacent competitors: People in a different niche who have a similar format or marketing funnel.
- Aspirational competitors: People in your niche who are at the level you're aiming for.
How do you find these people? Well, it's fairly simple. Use Google, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or Teachable course discovery to identify your competitors.
Let's come back to our yoga instructor example. Because you want to create an online course, let's go to Teachable's course discovery to see what's available.
And here's your first competitor—Rachel Jesien, who already has multiple courses on yoga. If you Google her name, you can find her Instagram.
After reviewing the posts, you may see that while you're in the same niche (yoga), your audience and business approach may not align. So, you put Rachel into the "adjacent competitor" list.
While you're on Instagram, utilize it to search for direct competitors. In the Search bar, type in "yoga for moms" and see what comes up.
While Instagram search is not the most refined, you can still see what some accounts pop up, like this one that offers yoga for toddler moms:
This account offers yoga practice tips for busy moms with small kids, you have a very clear audience overlap. So, add this account to your "direct competitors" list.
Next, let's see what YouTube has to offer. It's a good place to do your competitive market research because there are a ton of yoga teachers posting their classes online.
After searching for "yoga for moms" on YouTube, you can find tons of channels. Not all will target your target audience, but some might. Like this channel, "Boho Beautiful Yoga."
This is a large channel with millions of subscribers that has offers you want to sell, too, and a very clear target audience overlap. You can save this competitor to your "aspirational competitors" list.
Using this method, go through various platforms to compile a solid list of relevant competitors.
Step 3: Evaluate their offers
All right, the third step is to take a better look at the competitor list you made and evaluate their offers. For each competitor, answer these questions:
- What's their main product or service?
- What's the promise or transformation they sell?
- What's included in their offer?
- How are their offers priced and positioned?
This is where having a running Google Sheet or Notion database comes in handy to keep track of all the different competitor analyses at a glance.
Circling back to our yoga instructor example—let's analyze the offer of one of the direct competitors we found while doing research earlier, the "Yoga for Toddler Moms" Instagram account.
The creator has a link in their Instagram bio that leads to a professional-looking Linktr page, which tells us they have two offers:
- 1:1 coaching
- Membership site
Let's run a quick analysis of what appears to be the main offer:
- Main product/service: A monthly membership for moms of toddlers.
- The promise/transformation they sell: Finding calm and time for yourself in the chaos of being a mom is possible, here's how.
- What's included: Yoga classes designed to fit into a busy schedule, a range of tailored meditations, sound healing classes, a community of moms, and printable materials.
- Pricing and positioning: It's $6/month or $50/year for the subscription. They offer a 25% discount for those who choose the yearly subscription. Very well-priced offer that's appealing even to moms on a budget.
Step 4: Analyze their messaging and content strategy
Once you have a solid breakdown of your competitor's offers, it's time to take a look at their messaging and content strategy to see what works and what doesn't.
Break down their brand voice, values, and key differentiators:
- What tone of voice do they use?
- What's their unique point of view?
- What topics do they cover the most?
- What content drives the most engagement?
This is where you can use tools to help you perform an in-depth social media content analysis.
Let's get back to our previous yoga instructor example and examine the Instagram account of the hypothetical direct competitor "Yoga for Toddler Moms":
- What tone of voice do they use: Empathetic, friendly, uplifting, and genuine.
- What's their unique point of view: Motherhood is beautiful, but exhausting, and you're not alone in going through it.
- What topics do they cover the most: Gentle parenting, navigating motherhood, getting back into routines after kids, and how to emotionally regulate.
- What content drives the most engagement: Sharing relatable motherhood insights on Reels.
Step 5: Deconstruct their funnel
Once you've analyzed everything there's to analyze in terms of their content strategy, it's time to take a deeper dive into your competitor's marketing funnels.
Consider going through the buyer's journey when possible:
- Sign up for their lead magnets and free webinars
- Review their welcome emails and automated email sequences
- Track how they make a sale once you're in their ecosystem
As you go through these funnels, take notes on which elements feel polished, generic, pushy, or helpful. What resonates with you and entices you to purchase? What's missing? What would you do differently?
Let's return to our yoga example. Our hypothetical competitor for yoga practice courses, "Yoga for Toddler Moms," has a pretty good funnel set up. They offer a free bundle for stressed moms that offers valuable tools for their target audience in exchange for an email address:
The landing page is designed professionally, and the offer is clear and communicates the value people will receive if they choose to sign up.
Step 6: Spot the gaps and opportunities
The last and final step in your competitor analysis journey is to review all the research you've done so far, spot the gaps, and identify opportunities in those gaps. Ask yourself these questions:
- What pain points are the competitors solving?
- Which audience segment are they overlooking?
- Are their offers too generic or too advanced?
- How can you differentiate with your delivery format, community, support, or storytelling?
This is the step where your creator strategy takes shape. Use all the research you've done to sharpen your angle, not copy someone else's.
Let's see what gaps and opportunities we can spot in our hypothetical yoga practice competitor, "Yoga for Toddler Moms":
- What pain points are the competitors solving: Offer a manageable way for new moms to find time to invest in their well-being even when life is busy and hectic, and help find a supportive community of people who are going through the same thing.
- Which audience segment are they overlooking: The competitor focuses on toddler moms only, which may overlook moms with infants and older kids who need the same support.
- Are their offers too generic or too advanced: Their offer is too niche, and it may be leaving out a large portion of the target audience (an issue that can be fixed with a simple copy adjustment).
- How can you differentiate with your delivery format, community, support, or storytelling: Make it more personal (share your own experience of being a mother, and how you handle being a mom while still finding time for yourself), expand your audience to more than toddler moms (include infant moms, and moms of pre-school age kid who are navigating the same landscape), create an online course on post-natal yoga to recovery.
Bonus: Use AI to speed up analysis
Manual competitor analysis can be time-consuming. The good news is that current AI tools can help you speed up the process and analyze a lot of content quickly. Here are some prompts to try:
- "Summarize the unique positioning of these 3 online courses."
- "What audience segments are these creators targeting?"
- "List content themes and topics from the last 10 blog posts/newsletters of [X]."
Pro tip: If you use the Pro version of ChatGPT, make sure to take advantage of their "Deep research" feature, which performs a much more in-depth research and can offer much more insights into your competitor analysis.
Teachable's advantage: Built-In differentiation
Competitive research helps you identify gaps and opportunities in the market, and Teachable gives you the tools to fill those gaps and take advantage of those opportunities quickly and efficiently.
Here's how Teachable can help you stand out:
- All-in-one platform: You can host courses, offer coaching, and sell digital downloads all from a single dashboard.
- Custom branding: You can create landing pages to sell products and your online courses that reflect your unique personality and match the rest of your brand.
- Easy upsells: Teachable allows you to offer upsells and order bumps with ease to offer extra value to your audience and increase your revenue.
- Taxes handled for you: You don't have to worry about handling payments or taxes—Teachable does it for you, so you can focus on other parts of your business.
Action plan: Run your first competitive analysis in five days
Are you ready to take your business to the next level? While competitive analysis may look intimidating, it doesn't have to be a hard process. Don't believe us? Well, here's the plan of action on how to run a competitive analysis for creators in the next five days to help you see what's possible:
Day 1: Define your niche + pick your competitors
Dedicate one hour to:
- Clarify your products, audience, and goals
- Choose 307 creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs to analyze in your niche
Day 2: Collect data on their offers
Spend two to three hours (use AI tools to help you save time) to:
- Review competitor products, pricing, and bonuses
- Note what transformation they're selling
- Create a spreadsheet or database with side-to-side comparison
Day 3: Analyze messaging and content
Dedicate two hours to:
- Analyze landing pages, read emails, and review social captions
- Utilize AI to help you find repeated phrases and branded frameworks
- Identify their tone of voice and who it is attracting
Day 4: Deconstruct their funnel
Two hours is all you need to:
- Sign up for the email newsletter via the freebie
- Map their delivery journey from the landing page to the freebie delivery and sale
- Screenshot inspiring content and things you would change (make a note on how)
Day 5: Identify your edge
Dedicate one hour to brainstorm:
- What's missing in your competitor's approach?
- How can you take advantage of the neglected pain point?
- Draft a quick mission statement that highlights your unique edge
In five days and less than ten hours of work, you'll have a solid content strategy to help launch or boost your online business. Now, it's time to start building.
Level up your strategy and use Teachable to deliver offers your competitors can't match.
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