A written report on the three firms taking your customers
A Teardown of Your Three Competitors
You know their names. You see their billboards, you hear about them in the deals you lose, and you have a working theory about why they're winning. That theory has never been checked against anything, and you've been making budget decisions on it for years. This is the report that checks it.
The situation
You've been guessing about them for years
Watching a competitor from the outside is mostly watching the surface. You see the new sign, the sponsorship, the ad that keeps following you around the internet, and you assume there's a machine behind it. Sometimes there is. Often it's one channel working and four that aren't, and nobody outside the building can tell which is which by looking.
So the gaps get filled with assumption. They must be spending a fortune. Their SEO must be locked up. They must have someone good running that. Every one of those sentences ends in a decision about where your own money goes, and not one of them started with anything you actually looked at.
The record
Everything a competitor does in public leaves a record
We read the trail your competitors leave in the open, all of it available to anyone who knows where to look and almost never opened by the people it matters most to.
- The searches they show up for and where they land. Not a vague sense that they "do SEO," but the specific terms bringing them customers and the positions they hold on each one.
- The ads they're running right now. The ad platforms publish these in public libraries, complete and searchable, and most owners have never opened one. You get to read your competitor's ad copy the way their customers read it.
- What they publish and how often. Whether there's a real content operation behind the blog or three posts from 2023 and a long silence.
- What their customers say in reviews. Both halves of it. The praise tells you what they've earned a reputation for, and the complaints tell you where a customer is already unhappy enough to write it down in public.
- Their offers and pricing wherever they've made them public. What they lead with, what they bundle, and what they're willing to put a number on.
What you get
What lands in your inbox
A written report, three competitors, one section each, then a section on all three together.
- Where each one is genuinely strong, said plainly. A teardown that calls everyone weak isn't analysis, it's flattery, and it'll cost you the next time you assume you're ahead.
- Where each one is beatable. The specific soft spots, with what we saw that says so.
- Where their effort is actually going. Effort shows up in the record, and it's usually narrower than the reputation suggests.
- The gaps nobody owns. The searches, questions, and positions all three of them are leaving on the table.
- A short list of moves, in the order we'd make them.
- A walkthrough call, so you can push back on any of it and ask the questions the document didn't answer.
Findings are quoted and sourced, not asserted.
Honest limits
What we can't tell you
We can see everything your competitors do in public and nothing they do in private. That means no revenue figures, no client counts, no internal numbers, and no guesses dressed up as estimates. When something can't be known from the outside, the report says so instead of filling the space.
Picking the targets
Who are your three?
Name them and we'll take those three. If you'd rather, we'll work out who's actually taking your customers first, which is often not who you've been watching. The firm that occupies your attention and the firm quietly winning the searches your buyers run before they ever call anyone are frequently two different companies.
Questions people ask before they say yes
Will they know we did this?
No. Everything we read is already public and published by the platforms themselves. We don't contact them, we don't pose as a customer, and we don't touch anything of theirs.
What if one of them is just better than us?
Then you'll know exactly where, and that's a far more useful thing to own than a suspicion that they're better everywhere. Specific weakness is fixable. General dread isn't.
Can you find out what they're making, or how many clients they have?
No, and nobody honest can from the outside. Anyone who offers you a competitor's revenue figure is modeling a guess and calling it a finding.
Do we have to hire you to act on it?
No. You get the report and you decide. Hand it to your own team, hand it to another agency, or hand it to us.
Start with the three you already worry about
Send us the names, or tell us what you're seeing and we'll work out who they should be. Nothing is needed from you beyond that. No access, no accounts, no cooperation from anyone. We reply within one business day.
Part of Cascade's Marketing Strategy & Research practice.