Find Your Coaching Content Gaps: Competitor Topic Analyzer

Open up the LinkedIn feeds of five coaches in your niche and you’ll notice something depressing: they’re all writing the same posts. Same resume tips, same “imposter syndrome” platitudes, same five-step framework. The crowd is loud and the topics are picked over.

The opportunity isn’t in writing those posts slightly better. It’s in the gaps, the real questions your ideal client has that nobody is answering. This content gap analysis for coaches prompt maps what your competitors already cover, finds the underserved topics they skip, and scores each one so you know exactly where to point your energy first. By the end of this page you’ll also understand why the prompt produces a usable strategy instead of a generic list, so your next analysis is sharper.

When to use this

• You’re posting consistently but it feels like shouting into the same crowded room as everyone else.
• You’re planning a content calendar or newsletter series and want topics you can actually own.
• You’ve niched down and want to make sure your positioning is defensible, not a copy of three other coaches.
• You’re tired of guessing what to write and want a ranked shortlist with reasons.

The prompt

Copy this whole block into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:

You are a content strategist who specializes in helping coaches find underserved topics their competitors ignore. Your job is to run a content gap analysis: map what competitors already cover, then surface the high-value topics they are missing that I am uniquely positioned to own.

Before you analyze, ask me up to 3 clarifying questions if anything below is unclear or thin. Otherwise, proceed.

CONTEXT
- My niche: {{NICHE}}
- My ideal client: {{IDEAL_CLIENT}}
- Competitors / sources I want analyzed: {{COMPETITORS}}
- What those competitors already cover well (saturated topics): {{COMPETITOR_TOPICS}}
- My unique edge, story, or expertise: {{MY_EDGE}}
- Where I publish: {{PLATFORM}}

TASK
1. Briefly summarize the 3-5 themes my competitors are crowding into, and name the specific reader question each theme answers.
2. Identify 6-8 genuine content GAPS: real questions or pains my ideal client has that the saturated topics do NOT address. For each gap, explain why competitors skip it (too hard, too niche, requires real experience, too unglamorous, etc.).
3. Score each gap from 1-5 on two axes: Demand (how much my ideal client cares) and My Advantage (how well my edge lets me own it). Show both scores.
4. Recommend the top 3 gaps to pursue first, ranked, with one concrete content idea for each, written for {{PLATFORM}} (give a working title and a one-line angle).

CONSTRAINTS
- Do not invent traffic numbers, keyword volumes, or competitor stats. Reason from the niche and audience instead.
- Every gap must be a topic my ideal client would actually search for or struggle with, not a clever-sounding abstraction.
- Prefer gaps where my edge ({{MY_EDGE}}) is hard for competitors to copy.
- Present the 6-8 gaps as a table with columns: Gap | Why competitors skip it | Demand (1-5) | My Advantage (1-5).

End with one sentence on the single positioning theme that ties my best gaps together.

How to customize it

Replace the six {{VARIABLES}} before you send it. The two that matter most are {{COMPETITOR_TOPICS}} (be honest about what’s saturated) and {{MY_EDGE}} (this is what makes the gaps yours):

See it in action (full example)

Here is the exact prompt, filled in for a tech career coach. This is the whole input, nothing hidden:

You are a content strategist who specializes in helping coaches find underserved topics their competitors ignore. Your job is to run a content gap analysis: map what competitors already cover, then surface the high-value topics they are missing that I am uniquely positioned to own.

Before you analyze, ask me up to 3 clarifying questions if anything below is unclear or thin. Otherwise, proceed.

CONTEXT
- My niche: career coaching for mid-career women in tech
- My ideal client: senior engineers stuck below the manager level for 3+ years
- Competitors / sources I want analyzed: three LinkedIn creators in my space plus the top two blogs that rank for 'tech career coach'
- What those competitors already cover well (saturated topics): resume tips, salary negotiation scripts, interview prep, generic 'imposter syndrome' posts, LinkedIn profile optimization
- My unique edge, story, or expertise: I spent 12 years as an engineering director who actually sat on promotion committees, so I know how the decisions really get made
- Where I publish: LinkedIn posts and a weekly email newsletter

TASK
1. Briefly summarize the 3-5 themes my competitors are crowding into... [rest of the prompt unchanged]

And here is the complete output the model returns:

Quick check before I dive in: by “stuck below the manager level” do you mean they want to become managers, or that they want a senior/staff IC track but keep getting steered toward management? I’ll assume the first but flag ideas for both.

1. What your competitors are crowding into

• Getting hired — resumes, LinkedIn profiles, interview prep. Answers: “How do I land the next job?”
• Negotiation — salary scripts and counter-offers. Answers: “How do I get paid more for the job I’m taking?”
• Confidence/mindset — imposter syndrome posts. Answers: “Why do I feel like a fraud and how do I cope?”

Notice the pattern: every saturated theme is about changing jobs or feelings. None of them are about the mechanics of getting promoted where you already are.

2 & 4. The gaps (table below)

Gap	Why competitors skip it	Demand (1-5)	My Advantage (1-5)
How promotion committees actually decide (the unwritten rubric)	Requires having been in the room; most coaches never have	5	5
How to build a “promotion packet” / brag doc that a committee respects	Unglamorous, detailed, hard to make snackable	5	5
Why strong ICs get passed over even with great reviews	Uncomfortable truth; competitors prefer hopeful messaging	5	5
Manager track vs. staff/principal IC track: how to choose	Niche; most coaches lump all “growth” together	4	4
How to get a sponsor (not just a mentor) inside your org	Subtle org-politics topic that’s easy to get wrong	4	4
What to do when your manager won’t advocate for you	Requires real org experience to answer without platitudes	4	4
Reading the politics of a re-org without becoming political	Sensitive, easy to give generic advice	3	4
How visibility works for remote/hybrid engineers	Newer problem, less written about	3	3

3 & 4. Top 3 to pursue first

1. How promotion committees actually decide (Demand 5, Advantage 5). This is your single most defensible topic. No one with your committee experience is publishing here. – LinkedIn title: “I sat on promotion committees for 12 years. Here’s what we actually argued about.” – Angle: walk through the three questions a committee asks that have nothing to do with your code.
2. Why strong ICs get passed over (Demand 5, Advantage 5). – Newsletter title: “Your reviews are glowing. So why didn’t you get promoted?” – Angle: the gap between ‘doing senior work’ and ‘being legible as senior’ to people who weren’t watching.
3. The promotion packet that committees respect (Demand 5, Advantage 5). – LinkedIn title: “The brag doc that gets you promoted (most are written wrong).” – Angle: structure it around the committee’s rubric, not your to-do list. Include a one-page template.

Positioning theme: You are the coach who shows what happens inside the room where promotions are decided — a perspective your competitors structurally cannot offer.

That is a content strategy, not a brainstorm. The scores tell you where to start, the titles are ready to draft, and the positioning line is a tagline you could put on your homepage.

Why this works

Four LLM principles are doing the work here. Learn them and every analysis prompt you write improves:

1. Role priming narrows the model’s knowledge. “You are a content strategist who specializes in finding underserved topics” pulls the model toward strategic reasoning instead of a generic listicle. “Give me content ideas” gets you the bland average of the internet; a precise role gets you the specialist’s lens.
2. Specificity in, specificity out. The output is only as good as {{COMPETITOR_TOPICS}} and {{MY_EDGE}}. When you name the saturated topics honestly, the model can subtract them and find true white space. When you describe a concrete edge (“sat on promotion committees”), it can map gaps to that edge instead of guessing. Vague inputs produce a gap list anyone could have written.
3. Constraints are quality control. The “do not invent traffic numbers” line stops the model’s most common failure: hallucinating confident-sounding stats. The “must be something they’d actually search for” line kills clever-but-useless abstractions. Each constraint removes one specific way the answer could go wrong.
4. Forcing a scoring rubric forces real reasoning. Asking for Demand and My Advantage scores on a 1-5 scale makes the model commit to a judgment for every item, then rank. That’s far more useful than an unordered list, and it exposes weak ideas (low scores) instead of hiding them. When you want decisions and not just options, make the model score and rank.

Do this now

1. Copy the prompt above into ChatGPT or Claude.
2. Spend five real minutes on {{COMPETITOR_TOPICS}} and {{MY_EDGE}} — these two fields decide the quality of the whole output.
3. Send it. If it asks a clarifying question, answer honestly; that answer usually sharpens the gaps.
4. Take the #1 ranked gap and draft your first post or newsletter about it this week.

Pro tips

• Paste in real competitor text. If you copy two or three actual competitor posts into {{COMPETITOR_TOPICS}}, the model analyzes what’s really there instead of what you assume is there.
• Re-run it per platform. A gap that’s great for a newsletter deep-dive may be too long for a LinkedIn post. Run it once for each platform and compare the recommended formats.
• Turn the top gap into a series. Your highest Demand-plus-Advantage gap is rarely one post. Ask the model to break it into a 4-part sequence so you own the topic, not just touch it.
• Revisit quarterly. Competitors copy fast. Re-run the analysis every few months to find the next set of gaps before the crowd catches up.

Related

• 90-Day Content Calendar Builder for Coaches Launching a New Offer
• Content Pillar Architect: Define 4 Signature Themes for Your Coaching Brand
• Run a Rapid Competitor Teardown of Three Rival Coaches
• Build a Competitive Positioning Matrix for Your Coaching Niche