Conducting a competitive copywriting analysis w/ ChatGPT

Happy Wednesday! Welcome back to The Copywriting Gig.

I'm Jim Hamilton. Over the past 7 years, my copy has contributed to 30m+ in sales for clients across health, biz opp, and B2B.

Each week, I share 1 actionable tip to grow your business.

Analyzing the competition is a key step in writing copy that converts.

Especially for a new client, market, or offer.

Back in the good old days before ChatGPT, this had to be done manually.

You’d have to painstakingly review your competitor’s ads, emails, and sales pages to tease out:

+ The hook
+ Subheadlines
+ Unique mechanism
+ Common messaging themes
+ Credibility signals
+ Social proof
+ Etc

But not anymore.

Now, ChatGPT can do it for you in a fraction of the time.

So today, I’m sharing the series of prompts I use to conduct a competitive copywriting analysis in minutes instead of hours.

Plus how to customize it for yourself.

Let’s dive in.

Read time: 2 minutes and 57 seconds

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Step 0: Pre-requisites

This series of prompts requires access to GPT-4 (which costs $20/mo).

We’ll also need ChatGPT to read a webpage.

But since web browsing was disabled in July…

We’re going to use a plugin called Access Link as a workaround.

To enable plugins:

Go to Settings > Beta features > Plugins.

Once you’ve toggled that on, go the Plugin store and find Access Link:

Next, start a new chat with Access Link enabled:

Now we’re ready to rumble.

(DISCLAIMER: Access Link does have some limitations. I’ve found it’s unable to read some pages, depending on design and length of copy. So keep that in mind. But the good news is, once ChatGPT re-enables web browsing, you’ll be able to skip this Plugin step altogether.)

Step 1: Analyze

Every conversation you have with ChatGPT should start by assigning it a role and task.

Once you’ve done that, then you can expand on exactly what you want it to do.

In the case of a competitive analysis…

We want to include things like:

• Hook

• Headline

• Product name

• Target audience

• Common messaging themes

• Unique value proposition

• Etc etc

This is an opportunity for you to customize the prompt by adding in any other dimensions of the page you want to analyze.

(I’ve included mine in a Google doc at the bottom of this email.)

Just make sure to include examples for anything that could be ambiguous.

Here’s the prompt:

Today you are a world-class marketing analyst with a meticulous attention to detail. We are going to perform a competitive analysis. I want you to go to this URL and read everything on the page: [INSERT URL HERE]. Once you’ve done that, I want you to extract the following information for me:

- Dimension 1
- Dimension 2
- Dimension 3

Step 2: Double-check

What I’ve found is that ChatGPT will often miss things on the first pass.

So I ask it to double-check its findings:

Here’s the prompt:

Great! Nice work. Can you do a second pass and see if there is anything you missed?

Step 3: Combine

Assuming it did miss something, we want to combine both sets of findings into one completed list we can refer back to.

Here’s the prompt:

Great! Thank you. Now can you add all of this to your original findings so we have one complete list?

Putting It All Together

3 steps to conducting a competitive analysis w/ ChatGPT:

1) Analyze
2) Double-check
3) Combine

Here’s an example of a completed analysis.

This makes it so much easier to see how your competitors are positioning their offers.

(I still remember having to do this old fashioned way lol)

You can even run this analysis on your own sales page and then get ChatGPT to produce ad, email, or content ideas for you.

As I mentioned, I’ve put together my customized prompts in a Google doc for you.

It’s got 20 different dimensions I like to use when analyzing a competitor’s marketing or sales page.

If you want to check it out, click or tap below:

ChatGPT Competitive Analysis

Hit File > Make a copy to add it to your own Google Drive.

That’s it.

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

Jim Hamilton

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