How to write a competitive article?

In today's competitive landscape, writing an article that stands out is a constant challenge., particularly one that pits yourself against the competition. In the analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) market, many vendors strive to outshine their competitors. Some do this by head-to-head comparisons, accurately highlighting differences, while others focus on discrediting competitors by emphasizing negative reviews. While trying to get the edge over the competition is part of business. doing it in a transparent and balanced fashion is how it should be.

How to write a competitive article?

A competitive article that adheres to best practices in comparative analysis will be more valuable and credible. By providing balanced, well-supported critiques and detailed comparisons, the article can effectively assist users in making informed decisions, ultimately reflecting positively on the author and their company.

Let's dive into what to do and what to avoid, both before and during the writing of a competitive article.

Best practices for writing a competitive article

When writing a competitive article, it’s essential to provide a balanced, factual, and user-centric evaluation to guide readers effectively. This not only helps build credibility but also ensures that your article stands out as a reliable resource. Here are some best practices to follow:

1. Objectiveness: Maintain an unbiased and objective tone throughout the article. Avoid language that unfairly undermines competitors. Share your experiences with competitors, but ensure the information is accurate and fair.
2. Clear goals: Decide if you want a high-level comparison or an in-depth analysis of use cases. Include detailed comparisons of features, performance, pricing, and user satisfaction. Clearly define the value of your article and what sets you apart from competitors.
3. Balanced research: Use negative comments judiciously and supplement them with thorough research from documentation, blog articles, and official pages. Provide a fair evaluation by highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of all competitors.
4. User-centric approach: Understand your audience's needs and provide in-depth, factual information. Whether offering a high-level comparison or a deep dive into use cases, aim to help users make informed choices with clear, objective evaluations.
5. Fact-based approach: Support all claims, including negative reviews, with official documentation or credible sources. Ensure your information is accurate and verifiable.
6. Find the balance between you and your competitor: Compare yourself with the competitor comprehensively. Avoid focusing solely on the competitor and briefly mentioning your own product at the end. Clearly explain why users should choose your product, providing specific advantages and unique selling points.

Pitfalls of writing a competitive article

When writing a competitive article, it's crucial to maintain fairness, credibility, and value for the readers. Here are key pitfalls to avoid:

1. Bias in research: Avoid focusing solely on unsupported negative comments about competitors. Omitting positive aspects creates a biased and unbalanced view, diminishing the article's fairness.
2. Lack of facts: Support critiques with official documentation or credible sources. Relying on personal stories or unverified claims reduces credibility. For instance, simply describing a pricing overview table via different tiers without additional information can seem like an attempt to negatively portray the competitor.
3. Ignoring best practices: Highlighting only negative aspects without evaluating strengths and weaknesses can mislead readers and violate ethical standards. Readers may perceive that you are more focused on competitors than offering valuable insights about your own product.
4. Unfair strategy: Attempting to undermine a competitor instead of providing a fair comparison erodes user trust and damages credibility. Comparing with smaller companies without accurate information can appear as a shallow tactic to rank on search engines.
5. Missed comparisons: Overemphasizing competitor weaknesses can lead to neglecting your product's strengths. This approach results in a lack of detailed comparisons of features, performance, pricing, and user satisfaction, missing the chance to provide valuable insights.
6. Ignoring audience needs: Users seek in-depth, factual, and objective evaluations. Articles lacking this depth fail to meet their needs. While your competitive article might increase traffic, it will not establish you as a valuable competitor in the eyes of the readers.

How we write competitive articles at GoodData

At GoodData we believe in best practices to deliver fair and balanced comparison content. We conduct thorough research, analyzing customer reviews on platforms like G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra. We emphasize that G2 reviews are based on likes and dislikes, and it's unfair to publish only negative comments. GoodData maintains high ratings on both G2 and TrustRadius and actively communicates with reviewers to improve our product by incorporating features that resonate with users.

In our comparison articles, each review — whether positive or negative — is supported by additional information from documentation, blog articles, videos, or guides to ensure accuracy. Our content includes head-to-head comparisons, highlighting what both GoodData and its competitors do well, and addressing specific solutions or use cases offered by each.

Examples of competitive articles

In GoodData, we have selected a few competitors to provide a high-level overview of vendors in the analytics and BI market. We took two approaches to write a competitive article: first, to provide a general overview of the key features of the best BI tools and the best embedded analytics tools; and second, to create head-to-head high-level overview articles focusing on each competitor separately, such as Power BI alternative, Qlik alternative, Sisense alternative, and more. Each fact we use in these articles is connected to relevant resources from specific competitor documentation or articles to ensure accuracy. To write a fair comparison, we not only focus on highlighting GoodData's capabilities but also examine the alternative solutions offered by the selected competitors and how they address various challenges.

An example of a poor competitive article is one that strategically targets a competitor for embedded analytics use cases (for instance) to highlight perceived weaknesses and differentiate their offerings. By emphasizing specific use cases and features, they aim to position themselves as superior alternatives in analytics and BI tools. They focus on highlighting capabilities from a negative perspective without substantiating their claims with facts from documentation or other available resources. They primarily rely on reviews, including outdated ones, to assert their competitive advantage.

Another approach taken is to focus on information within a pricing table and provide a basic comparison between different tiers, again without delving into details or complementing the comparison with information from other resources.

A further example that exemplifies some pitfalls of writing a competitive article can be found here. The article follows a similar approach to the previous example above, again selecting GoodData as their main competitor and discussing alternatives. While benefits and disadvantages are mentioned, they fail to include relevant references or address available resources, making the arguments feel unsubstantiated.

The companies in both the examples above fail to explain how their features work. Instead, they provide misleading information to atempt to obtain a competitive advantage and miss the opportunity to offer valuable insights. This diminishes the quality of their competitive analysis and fails to provide comprehensive information for users' evaluations.

Next steps with GoodData

Learn more about GoodData's architecture and solutions by checking out our resources and documentation. You can also sign up for a free trial. If you have specific questions related to your use case, reach out to our sales team by requesting a demo.