How to Use Clay to Predict Potential Company Competitors

Predicting potential company competitors can help you sharpen your business strategies. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can easily identify rival companies using Clay. 

Christy Cañete

Updated September 14, 2023

find company competitors

find company competitors

Reading Time: 6 minutes

All businesses face competition.

The big question is - how do you know your direct and indirect company competitors?

Traditional approaches might include:

  • sifting through local business directories
  • looking through advertisements
  • joining exhibitions and trade fairs
  • gathering information from customers

While these methods have their merits, they are often time-consuming.

But with Clay, you no longer need to juggle through multiple sources.

This amazing tool can help you gather information about prominent market players and emerging contenders. It also streamlines the entire process, making your competition research more efficient.   

find company competitors

In a few minutes, I’m going to show you how to use Clay to find potential company competitors. Read on!

Benefits of Predicting Potential Company Competitors

One way to craft a winning marketing strategy is to know who your competitors are. 

After all, if you don’t have any idea who your competitors are, it would be difficult to differentiate yourself in a competitive market.

Let me share with you some of the benefits of knowing your competitors:

  • Enhance your unique selling proposition: Knowing your competitors can help you fine-tune your unique selling proposition and stand out from the competition.   
  • Identify gaps and opportunities: Potential customers might be seeking products or services that are currently not offered by your competitors. You can use this opportunity to fill your customer’s needs.
  • Capitalize on your competitor’s weaknesses: Your competitors might be lacking some skills and resources that you have. You can step in to meet that demand and grow in the market.
  • Discover potential threats to your business: Knowing your competitors can also help you identify the challenges they’re facing. This allows you to manage risks proactively.

Thankfully, finding competitors doesn’t have to be complicated. In the next section, I’ll show you how you can easily do your research using Clay.

How to Find Company Competitors Using Clay

1) Add the ‘Get Competitors for a Company’ Action

Let’s say you already have a list of companies you’re interested in. 

The first thing that you need to do is create a new table in Clay and import your list. 

Make sure your list includes the website URL of each company. If not, you can use Clearbit to enrich your list and retrieve the company's domain. Refer to our separate tutorial on how to get a site domain from a company list to learn how. 

add list on Clay table

Once your list is ready, tap ‘Add Enrichment.’

add enrichment on Clay

A pop-up will appear. From there, choose the ‘Get Competitors for a Company’ action.

get competitors for a company

2) Set the Company Domain as Input

Next, you’ll need to input an API key to proceed. 

If you don’t have an Owler account, I highly recommend you use Clay’s Owler API Key. Then, choose the column with the company domains as your input.

set API and inputs on Clay

After setting it up, tap ‘Continue to Add Fields.’

In the next window, you'll get an option to add additional columns. For this tutorial, we’ll keep it simple and proceed without changes.

add data as a column

Then, click save and run.

Your table should now display the list of potential competitors for each company, as shown here.

list of company competitors

3) Organize Competitor Information

As you’ve noticed in the results, each company can have multiple competitors. These are referred to as objects.

We are mainly interested in getting the information of each competitor company. In this instance, it’s better to write out this information in a new table. Doing it this way will make it easier for you to enrich the data and find more information for each competitor company.

To streamline, we’re going to create a separate row for each competitor.

Let’s create a new table to write the information from the original table. Add two columns for the ‘Company Name’ and ‘Domain,’ as shown below.

create a new table on Clay

Let’s leave this for now until we’ve added the ‘Write to Other Table’ integration to our original table.

4) Add the ‘Write to Other Table’ Action

Return to your original table and add a new enrichment. Then, search and click the ‘Write to Other Table’ action.

write to other table

5) Map the Table Columns

In this step, we’re going to define the fields that we’ll need to map to our new table.

First, choose the table to write to. In this case, it’s the one we created in the previous step (‘Find Company Competitors’). 

Then, select a column from the original table where our data is sourced. For this, choose ‘Get Competitors for a Company’ > ‘competitor’ > ‘Insert all N items.’ 

select a column to write to

Next, map the fields between the tables. For this tutorial, we’re going to choose the ‘website’ and ‘name’ values from ‘Get Competitors for a Company.’ Keep in mind that ‘name here refers to the competitor’s company name.

add values from objects

So, connect the ‘Domain’ column from your new table to the ‘website’ column of the original one. Similarly, link ‘Competitors’ to ‘name.’

To keep track, you might also want to map the original company names as references. Within the ‘Add other data from this table’ fields, map the company name columns of the new and original tables, as shown below.

add values from original table

After all the fields are correctly mapped, hit save and run the integration. This might take a few seconds, depending on how long your list is. 

6) Verify the Output

Once completed, your original table should now look like this.

write to other table output

Then, check the other table you’ve created. It should be populated with the corresponding competitor data, as shown below.

write to other table output

What’s Next?

There you go! You’ve just learned how to use Clay to identify potential competitors for a list of companies. Check out our full review if you want to see EVERYTHING it can do.

The next step is to enrich your new list. 

Using Clay’s rich features, you can do things like: 

  • finding recent news about companies you’re interested in
  • accessing the latest fundraising data from companies
  • finding a business’s Google review information 

We’ll keep making new tutorials to help you use Clay better. So, stay tuned!

If any of the steps above were unclear, or if you have additional questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

Want to Learn Even More?

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to our free newsletter where we share tips & tricks on how to use tech & AI to grow and optimize your business, career, and life.


Written by Christy Cañete

Christy Cañete is a software engineer who's passionate about front-end web design. Not only can she code, but she writes too! She loves breaking down technical topics into super easy tutorials. If you're looking to learn without the jargon, she's your go-to.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments